Slurs in Story–Right or Wrong?

Is it ever acceptable to use slurs in story?

I’ve been called out over a story I wrote that uses a racial slur. Not often — just three times.

The story’s setting is a contemporary mirror-Earth. In the first instance, a walk-on character calls our main character a “nigger.” In the second and third, the main character is referring to himself.

So, is using slurs of any kind okay? It depends. If the slur has a purpose in telling the story, it’s fine. If it is used indiscriminately and doesn’t add to the story, it’s not.

Context is key.

What purpose does it serve?

Take a memoir of someone who lived during a time when the use of the word nigger was commonplace. The narratives of former slaves recorded in the 1930s and 1940s are a case in point. They are riddled with the slur because that’s what the master class called slaves, and it’s what the slaves called themselves.

Imagine removing the term nigger and replacing it with “n-word” or “n****r.” It would destroy the narrative’s authenticity. I also think they’d consider such a nicety to be beyond ludicrous.

Erasing the slur also diminishes the narrators’ legacy — how people lived back then and saw themselves. It’s no different from the Brothers Grimm bowdlerizing the folk tales they collected from the people who narrated them to make the stories palatable to their contemporaries who were their customers.

Context is key.

In fiction, the same considerations apply. Take a story set in the mean streets of the inner city in a large metropolis, where the characters routinely refer to themselves and each other as niggers and bitches, and no one takes offense. In that context, are the terms even slurs?

Slurs can also act as shortcuts to describe a character’s character. In my story, the walk-on, a white woman, calls our hero a nigger. By that one sentence, the reader instantly knows what kind of person she is, despite her furs and other finery. Not anyone I’d want to know, that’s for sure.

In contemporary fiction, not using slurs — where appropriate — also destroys the narrative’s authenticity. Our society is aware of the reason using slurs is painful to the persons they’re directed at. Above all, they’re dehumanizing.

Yet these words are still uttered in real life, and with abandon. To not use them in context because a reader’s sensitive feelings will be hurt diminishes the story, and more to the point, the character that utters them.

This is not to belittle the dilemma in which a white writer might find themselves when writing Black — or Asian, or Latinx — characters. Issues of race in our day are a minefield.

Okay for one, but not the other.

The person who called me out is a fellow writer who is white. Our contact had been limited to Discord, and our avatars were not our likenesses. He wrote he’d never use such a slur in a story. When he learned I’m Black, his objection to my using nigger ceased.

You see, that’s how I knew he was white — and he thought I was, too. If he’d known my race, I doubt he would have protested in the first place.

But what does that mean for the white writer who wants to write characters of a different race? Does it mean they can never write Black, Asian, or Latinx characters living on the mean streets? Assuming they did the research, could a white writer get away with writing and selling novels like Iceberg Slim’s Trick Baby? Slurs abound in that story.

Probably not.

Slurs in story. Will we ever get to a place where any writer, no matter their color, can create characters of other races, warts and all? I don’t know. I think the wounds are still too raw for much progress.

Perhaps one day.

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