Mom, What’s the N-word?
My daughters have a favorite Queer Episode. It’s the one with Mama Tammye and her son, Myles. Mama Tammye is the kind of Christian woman I aspire to be — welcoming, affirming, grace-filled. Myles, her gay son, spends the episode grappling with the damage done by homophobic church-goers and the prejudices in his community. Their church’s homecoming celebration is coming up. Mama Tammye hopes Myles will come back to church even if it’s just for the Homecoming. Myles isn’t sure he can bear to return. I cry every time I watch it.
We turned it on again on Sunday. My eight year old, Viola, was on the floor, my eleven year old, Margaret, was perched on the couch with a book, Myles was on his front porch with Karamo talking about the difficulty of being a black gay man in his small Georgia town. He said that he was bullied as child for being gay and for being black. He said that people called him the n-word.
Viola is obsessed with cataloguing every bad word ever conceived and seemed to be hearing this detail for the first time. She flipped her head toward me,
“Mom, what’s the n-word? Is it a curse word?”
It’s a question I should have answered before she had to ask it. But I didn’t. We’ve read about slavery and talked about Jim Crow and found every picture book on the civil rights era. We’ve discussed that in every era anti-black…
