The N-word, Quebec, and the CRTC

The Federal Court of Appeal has released its decision in Société Radio-Canada v. Canada (Attorney General), in which the Attorney General of Canada brought a motion to allow an appeal of a decision by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) upholding a complaint criticizing the Société Radio‑Canada (SRC) for having broadcast a segment where the N-word was repeated four times (three times in French, once in English). This came in the context of repeating the title of an (in)famous book.

Use of the N-word has become an object of bizarre obsession among certain corners of the Quebec commentariat and another skirmish in the broader culture wars about “woke” officials/elites trampling on people’s freedoms. The debate often involves white people deeply offended at the idea that they shouldn’t throw around that word. I’ll admit to not understanding what’s so hard about saying “the N-word” instead of saying the N-word but where the culture wars go, rationality rarely follows.

The moral and social reason to avoid saying the N-word is obvious, especially for people who stop to think about it for a minute: the N-word is a powerful and ugly denigration, even relative to most other slurs, and if society - and especially Black people - don’t want to hear it from the mouths of others, even when it is being merely uttered (in a book title, or song lyrics, etc.) as opposed to being hurled as an insult, it is reasonable to adhere to the social or moral obligation to avoid saying it. Or, if you do, to accept the social consequences.

That all said, in these debates, the distinction between moral and social values on the one hand, and state regulation or sanction of speech on the other, often gets a bit lost. There’s a distinction to be made between not having the social license to say the word, and whether the state (or public institutions, like universities) should sanction or prohibit the word. This is not to say there aren’t occasions where they can’t, and here is where context does matter. There are contexts where use of the N-word would constitute hate speech under Canadian law. Similarly, a professor who directed the word as a slur against a student would be rightfully subject to employment consequences.

This is different than the state banning broadcasters from employing the word regardless of context, and here is where the Federal Court of Appeal determined that the CRTC mis-stepped (I’m skipping over other elements of the decision, including those relating to the CRTC’s jurisdictional scope): it failed to properly consider the Charter rights at stake.

People actually do have a legal right to utter the N-word, and while it’s a shame that some aren’t sensible enough to adhere to basic moral and social propriety around it, the law and state regulation have no place in deciding to outright ban words in a free and democratic society. This even applies to universities. My own institution, the University of Waterloo, provided a good example of why: in the immediate aftermath of its own “course instructor utters the N-word” controversy, the administration issued a dictum effectively prohibiting the use of the word. Except it failed to consult Black faculty and students on campus, including those Black faculty who teach about systemic racism and oppression, and who - for obvious reasons related not merely to free expression but also academic freedom - might choose to employ the word in class. The university soon apologized and retracted its statement, leaving the issue back in the judgment of course instructors.

None of which to say is that broadcasters on the SRC or university faculty don’t remain subject to prevailing moral and social norms on the N-word. They can use it at their own reputational peril. But the CRTC, universities, and public institutions more broadly overstep by employing legal regulation to outright prohibit language, even the worst language, without any careful consideration of the context in which it is used and, importantly, who might be using it.

This latter point raises the spectre of race-based language rules, but that’s precisely the social and moral norms I’m talking about, and how simply transposing them to legal/employment ones is a bad idea: an outright prohibition of the N-word leads to the utter absurdity of telling Black people they can’t say it. When critical race scholars talk about whiteness, this is perhaps an example of what they mean - our predominantly white institutions have a bad enough history policing the lives of ‘others’, and they should think twice before making blanket rules about language even when they think they are doing so on behalf of those they’ve historically oppressed. This is another reason, as I’ve written in a recent paper, why our desire to frame these debates as necessarily pitting equality and free expression principles against each other is misguided.

This particular case might seem like a big victory for culture warriors seemingly obsessed with their freedom to use the N-word, as if - I repeat - literally saying “the N-word” instead of the word itself is some big violation of liberty. Perhaps if we were capable of having these debates and making distinctions between what you can do and what you should do in a free and democratic society, we might not be wasting resources on these easy (legally speaking) cases.