Two students walked toward each other on Manual High’s stage during an assembly Wednesday billed as a mock funeral for the N-word.
“What’s up, (expletive)’?” said one student during the skit, embracing the other.
The crowd giggled. Someone yelled out, “Whazzup?”
The N-word is everywhere, according to students. It’s uttered in greetings, in threats, before fights, in rap lyrics and in TV and film dialogue.
Whether a mock funeral for the word at the half-black, half-Latino school will work remains to be seen.
“We won’t be able to change what’s going on outside of the building, but we can change it inside,” said Michael Simmons, community liaison who organized the rite, complete with horse-led procession, hearse, pallbearers and black coffin adorned with flowers.
Similar events have taken place in Detroit and Florida.
The message Wednesday was to stop using the word and other hurtful terms, eliminate negative thinking and focus on raising the academic bar at the struggling school.
Jack Jack Gratton from the gay and lesbian community urged students to stop using terms that denigrate homosexuals.
It was the year’s first assembly at Manual High, which reopened in August after closing for a year because of poor performance.
The ceremony sought to teach students about the N-word’s violent past.
“If you knew its origin, you wouldn’t use it,” said the Rev. Bryce Rodgers, who spoke at the ceremony.
A slide show played gruesome photos of lynchings and burned and mangled corpses.
“Imagine how many blacks heard the word as their eyes bulged out and the rope snapped on their necks,” Rodgers shouted.
“This is a new day,” he said, “the day we raise up the noose — a day we no longer say ‘(expletive),’ ‘bitch’ and ‘ho.’ The day we throw off the dunce cap of ignorance and put on the graduation cap of knowledge.”
Minutes after the event, Iesha Hall, 14, said she’d heard a student call another the B-word.
“It’s like they didn’t even care,” she said.
But some of her classmates said the ceremony changed their way of thinking.
“I am not going to use that word now that I know the history behind it,” said Siraj Ameen.
“The pictures made me think that words like that hurt people,” said Kassie Leaks.
Whether ceremonies can force a language change is doubtful, said John Rickford, linguistics professor at Stanford University.
“You can’t swim against linguistic tide,” he said.
The N-word carries weight, he said, especially among younger people.
“It’s a word that is almost bleached of its connection to race,” he said, though its hurtful past “is still there hovering in the background.”
Lequita Taylor knows that power. She owns the funeral home that put on Wednesday’s ceremony and said she has seen too many children die in violence spurred by use of the N-word.
Recently, she helped bury a 13-year-old boy who was murdered, she said.
“When the boy shot him, he said, ‘What’s up, (expletive)? Where you from?”‘ Taylor said. “Now, sometimes I hear it from 5- or 6-year-olds. It hurts my heart. It’s not right.”
Jeremy P. Meyer: 303-954-1367 or jpmeyer@denverpost.com
Updated May 20, 2022 This story has been updated to remove a racist expletive that had been used in several quotations.
