White People Weigh In On How They Should Be Punished For Using The N-Word
Can you be "excessive" when punishing a racist?
Judge Olu Stevens
Yesterday, we discussed Judge Olu Stevens slapping a 60 day “contempt” ruling on a defendant who called him a “punk-ass n***er” in open court. Stevens eventually reduced the sentence to 24 hours after the man apologized. But in the interim a whole bunch of people — white people mainly — called the judge’s ruling “excessive.”
On Facebook, I snarkily suggested that white people should feel free to offer their thoughts on how a black judge should punish a person who calls him n***er in his own courtroom. It was my way of suggesting that the fox is not really the best person to ask about how to secure the hen house.
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But since white people are almost comically unable to resist the paternalistic urge to tell black people how to feel about things, we can now present some crowdsourced wisdom about appropriate n***er-guy punishments:
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God, listening to white people talk about the n-word is like listening to Macklemore. I’m struck, as I always am, about how people can’t even talk about the n-word except as by analogy to some other four-letter word. This guy didn’t call Olu Stevens “Judge Cocksucker” in open court. He didn’t call him something similarly “openly defiant.” There’s no white guy equivalent to the word. It’s like telling a woman that passing your kidney stone was just like giving birth.
Speaking of women, I had to extend a personal invitation to get Kathryn Rubino to comment since my Facebook page turned into a sausage party:
I think a lot of the faux-rage over the initial 60 day sentence is that it inverts the traditional power dynamic. The sad truth is that black men get called the n-word ALL THE DAMN TIME by ignorant white dudes, but rarely do they have the opportunity and power to directly teach them a lesson about it. In the moment, Judge Stevens had the means and wherewithal to concretely demonstrate that not only is it woefully inappropriate to use that language in a courtroom, but that in 2016 a black man in Kentucky is powerful enough to make a racist pay. I think that is what actually has made a lot of people uncomfortable with the sentence.
Disagreeing with white people on matters of crime and punishment puts me in a tough spot. A black man trying to argue with white people about how to stop racism is usually left with two options. Option A is to play the Oreo, assimilationist role and say “Yes’m, I sho’ nuff agree with your cracker precedents for punishing racists. My pappy always did say that if you can’t learn him by sunup, you can’t learn him a’tall.” Option B is to play the angry, oversensitive, militant role and argue “YES THEY DESERVED TO DIE AND I HOPE THEY BURN IN HELL.”
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The fact is, we don’t have an appropriate punishment for being racist towards a judge because the system has never cared enough about deterring racism to create one. We have a punishment for pissing off a judge, or disrespecting him or her, or disrupting the court process. It’s called “contempt of court” and it’s been around forever. But we don’t have a punishment for being racist towards a judge… because white people think calling a judge a n***er is just like “that one time when a guy called me smelly and I totally threw him in jail for a whole day!”
I think the punishment for using a racial epithet at a judge in their own courtroom should be whatever the hell the judge wants it to be. I think it should be arbitrary and capricious. I think people who really want to use that word in court should need to have an 8th Amendment lawyer on speed dial to handle their cruel and unusual appeal. I think judges should be able to threaten 60 days and knock it down to 24 hours so that the racist asshole knows he has been shown grace and mercy. I don’t think it’s a slippery slope from using the n-word to over punishing people for other, “defiant” speech, because I don’t subscribe to the false equivalency between the n-word and other insults.
I think that people shouldn’t say the n-word in court, and I think that if black people got to have an equal voice in this system, somebody would call a judge a n***er once more and then it would never happen again.
