The Provocative Texas Short Film On Race And Language
To explain the Texas short film, “The Word,” (now available on YouTube), I have to spoil the ending. Don’t worry. You’ll have guessed it by the time you finish reading the next paragraph anyway.
The short opens in an opulent boardroom. At one end are two very distinguished white men played by Rutherford Cravens and Joe Grisaffi. At the other are two very perplexed-looking Black men played by Billy. D. Washington and Sam Demaris. The white men offer an unknown but substantial amount of money as reparations for slavery with one condition: they want to buy the right to use the n-word whenever they want. Washington and Demaris initially balk, but after hours of negotiation for additional concessions, they agree.
Then Cravens toasts his new [redacted] friends. Washington and Demaris, set down their champagne, realize that the deal will not work, and deliver a beating.
“The Word” was shot in 2023, but it had been sitting around in director Houston director Robert M. Neilson’s and producer Adam James Taylor’s heads long enough that the original script had a reference to President George W. Bush. For obvious reasons, they felt that tackling so contentious a subject, even as a short comedy, required care and an open mind.
That’s where Washington and Demaris entered the picture. Not only do the two turn in excellent performances as the representatives of Black America entertaining this deal, they contributed substantial rewrites to the script’s ending.
“I wanted no part of this when I first saw it,” says Washington, who recently starred in the one man show Better Person. “I’d known Rob and Adam for years and we were always itching to collaborate, but…”
Demaris, currently working as a comedian in Los Angeles but with Houston roots, recalls getting the script and having deep misgivings. “I started reading it, and just as I got to the end, Billy calls me,” he says. “We both go, ‘nah, that ending, though.’”
In the original script, the Washington and Demaris sign the deal, and the two white men go out into the streets to proudly spout the forbidden slur. It was important to Washington and Demaris that their characters reach a deeper realization about the word and deliver the comeuppance rather than just take the money and run.
The core of the film is two monologues, one delivered by Cravens and the other by Washington. Cravens’s is an irritatingly privileged take on humanity’s need to conquer boundaries. He openly acknowledges that Black Americans have suffered and makes no effort to defend the bigotries of past or present.
Washington answers with his own exploration of the word, much of it drawn from Washington’s own work on stage.
“That word is both the best and the worst of our people,” he says. “We are both proud of it and ashamed. [The white men] are naïve to the power of their statement. I could see white guys sitting around having that conversation, but there needed to be a profound answer. The same people who are diametrically opposed to DEI will use that same principle to answer the question. ‘if everyone can say it why can’t we? ’It does speak to the entitlement, the literal entitlement and privilege of white people. You can’t help it that you grew up as you did and had your experiences. The prevailing opinion on the word has to stop and start with Black people. That sounds territorial because it has to be.”
Demaris compares the word to “I am Groot” from The Guardians of the Galaxy films. It’s something that is infused with nuance based on cultural understanding. The meaning changes.
“You may just hear “Groot,” he says. “But there’s so much history with that word, most of it violent. When we say it, we can think that those violent days are over, but when I hear them say it, it instantly reminds me that those days are not nearly as over as I thought.”
“The Word” is funny. The well-meaning but utterly out of touch presentation of Cravens and Grisaffi, right down to a segment where Cravens freestyles into a gold karaoke machine, hit the funny bone just right. Washington and Demaris’s responses to the offer move between an understandable desire to walk away with something material from this nonsense and compulsion to educate.
Neilson decided to release the film for wider audiences for free suddenly on YouTube for Black History Month. With the very institution of Black History Month currently under attack by the Trump Administration, he and Taylor felt it was time for people to see the story. When it was first shot, the two sides of the table were not even in the same room together. No one but Neilson and Taylor knew how it would turn out. Demaris remembers being pleasantly surprised at the first screening.
“I’m proud of how it turned out,” he says. “You have to be very careful. It is the most polarizing word in the English language. I am laughing so you don’t see me cry. Rob and Adam were 100 percent understanding of that and listened to us when we told him parts of the script needed to change. My mom drank from the colored fountain, and I will be dead before that word becomes acceptable for other races to use, if it ever does.”
