A 22-year-old black student has accused police and prosecutors of misusing hate speech laws intended to protect minorities after she was charged for using the N-word in a tweet.
Jamila A, who lives in London, was charged under the Communications Act 2003 in July 2023 after referring to the black Newcastle United footballer Alexander Isak as a “nigga” in a tweet.
Her legal team argued the term was widely used in African American vernacular English and black British English and differed significantly from the racial slur ending in “-er”.
The tweet was flagged by a data monitoring organisation and passed to the Metropolitan police, whose referral to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) led to charges, prompting a legal battle that lasted one and a half years.
The CPS ultimately dropped the case, citing insufficient evidence for a realistic prospect of conviction.
Jamila told the Guardian she had been prosecuted for speaking in a way “that came naturally to me as a black woman”.
“Everyone was so angry on my behalf: my mum, my siblings, my friends … They just thought it was outrageous because, of all the people they could prosecute for saying the N-word, they chose another black person.”
She added: “I can go outside right now … and there’d be a million people who listen to rap songs that have the N-word in there and they sing along to it but nothing will ever happen to them, but they will get you, a black person, for saying the N-word in your language.”
Jamila said she realised she was in trouble when police turned up at her house last summer. She was not home, but her mother called her, and she was suddenly filled with dread. A text message from the investigating officer told her she was wanted for questioning over a “racial” tweet.
“I was trying to rack my brain to think of what could I possibly have said that anybody could have considered as racist … Then I went to the station, saw the tweet, and thought: are they being for real?”
Her defence team, led by the barrister Ife Thompson of Nexus Chambers and the solicitor Ghislaine Sandoval of Hodge Jones & Allen, argued that the CPS failed to consider the cultural and linguistic context of the term. They said the N-word, when spelled with an “-a”, was commonly used within black communities worldwide as a form of reclamation and solidarity.
They also pointed out that no evidence was provided to show that the tweet was found offensive, indecent or menacing, even by the recipient.
A CPS spokesperson said: “After careful consideration, and in line with our duty to keep all charged cases under review, we have concluded there is no longer sufficient evidence to provide a realistic prospect of conviction, and the case has been discontinued.”
When contacted about the case by the Independent newspaper in July last year, the CPS had said: “Hate crime has a profound impact on victims and communities. Being from an ethnic minority background does not provide a defence to racially abusing someone. Our commitment to tackling these abhorrent crimes through fair and impartial prosecution is unwavering.”
Jamila said: “The hard ‘r’ is a slur that was used in the mid-19th century against African Americans … Around the mid-20th century, African Americans, reclaimed that word with an ‘a’ as a way to refer to each other … And it was very different in pronunciation, especially with the American accent, between the hard ‘r’ and with the ‘a’.”
She said black Britons, too, had been dehumanised and called the N-word, and that through cultural exchange with African Americans, a similar process of reclamation had taken place in the UK.
Jamila claimed the police understood this. “Before I had the interview, he [the police officer] told me: ‘I know that in some languages, in some communities, you have words and phrases that you use that aren’t offensive amongst yourselves, but it’s been brought to us, so we have to deal with it.’”
Thompson, who led the defence, said the “case raises serious concerns about how the CPS and police are unfairly and inappropriately criminalising Black language speakers”.
Jamila, when asked what she would say to those who believed no one should use the N-word, responded: “I can respect your opinion, but I have my own. And just because you think nobody should be saying it, doesn’t mean I should now be in court getting prosecuted for it.”
She added: “Black people can say it because it’s their language. If you’re going to prosecute people for saying the N-word, surely it should be an actual racist thing.”
