Make no mistake. I hate the n-word. I just hate censorship more.
New York’s resolution is not binding and merely calls on residents to stop using the slur. Leaders of the nation’s largest city also hope to set an example.
Other municipalities have already passed similar measures in a debate that rose to a fever pitch late last year after “Seinfeld” actor Michael Richards spewed the word repeatedly at a comedy club in Los Angeles.
At New York’s City Hall, supporters cheered passage of the resolution, with many of them wearing pins featuring a single white “N” with a slash through it.
Hip-hop pioneer Kurtis Blow Walker said blacks need to stop using the word so “we can elevate our minds to a better future.”
Others argue that use of the word by blacks is empowering, that reclaiming a slur and giving it a new meaning takes away its punch. Oscar-winner Jamie Foxx, for example, said he would not stop using the word, and did not see anything inappropriate about blacks using it within their own circles.
But in the uproar over Richards’ outburst, black leaders including the Rev. Jesse Jackson and California Rep. Maxine Waters said it is impossible to paper over the epithet’s origins and ugly history of humiliating blacks. They challenged the public and the entertainment industry to stop using the epithet.
And can we please take poor Michael Richards out of the stockade. That he has become the emblem for racism is, well… deeply indicative of the real problem.
I absolutely believed Michael Richards when he said he was not a racist. I think that’s why he upset people so much. He reminded us all of what lurks in our deep subconscious, in that dark place right next to our fears. A friend of mine calls them “isms.” My friend is a gay man who speaks of his own subconscious homophobia. He points out that these are inculcated attitudes that we ideologically and intellectually deplore. They can snap to the surface when we’re triggered, as Richards was, by aggressive heckling.
What’s worse. Richards’s meltdown — explained beautifully by Elayne Boosler — or this:
State Senators Robert Ford and Darrell Jackson are considered key black political leaders in South Carolina because they backed John Edwards in 2004 and managed to hand Edwards 37 percent of the vote in a state where half the primary voters are black.
For those of you who don’t understand why we keep harping on early primaries, it’s simple. If a presidential candidate wins an early primary state — like Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina — deep-pocket donors keep funding their campaigns.
The losing candidates are well on their way to becoming also-rans.
So you tell me why Ford and Jackson found it necessary to tell reporters that they were driving Miss Hillary so early in the game.
“It’s a slim possibility for [Obama] to get the nomination, but then everybody else is doomed,” Ford told a reporter with the Associated Press on Tuesday.
“Every Democrat running on that ticket next year would lose because he’s black and he’s top of the ticket. We’d lose the House and the Senate and the governors and everything,” he said. “I’m a gambling man. I love Obama,” Ford said. “But I’m not going to kill myself.”
This, from a man who claims in his bio that from 1966 to 1972, at the height of the civil rights movement, he was arrested 73 times as a staff member with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
Here’s a tip. One has tangible consequences.
Anyone who thinks we can unwrite our “isms,” or thoughtcrimes, by excising a word from the lexicon is naive. We would do better to grab hold of teachable moments, like Richards’s outburst, and open a real dialog. Anything less is just sticking our fingers in our ears and going, “la, la, la, la!”
Crossposted from The Blogging Curmudgeon.
I strongly disagree. America must eliminate the slur NIGGER from the common vernacular. Like “Step-n-fetchit” Jamie Foxx will always make his money playing black sterotypes in one form or another. He and Eddie Murphy will always defend public use of the word by so called Standup Comics and Rappers for their own personal financial gain. The idea that African Americans using the word can come to achieve ownership is utter nonsense. Many Black kids living in the projects subscribe to using the “N” word constantly, but they still don’t own anything and in most instances, are barely able to hang onto their own lives. So what is this ownership BS?
Open up your eyes and wake up to the reality that the people most engaged by the “N” word are White people, Asian people, East Indian people and the rest of the non African American people and Non American Indian people who call America their home. It reinforces the idea that ordinary African Americans are the bottom class in this country, there is no group LOWER. With the current migration of many diverse groups to America, racists cling to the “N” word like it’s the Pledge of Allegiance. It helps to comfort them when they are starting to feel overwhelmed by the sudden explosion of black and brown faces on the streets of America.
White America has lost its prime identifier of the Negro, skin colour. Back in John Wayne’s day, an observation of a black body automatically meant you were looking at a Negro. But now-a-days there are East Indians and Pakistanis who are present in this country whose skin pigmentation is twice a black as Jamie Foxx, while the race listed on their official documentation (driver’s license, passport, etc) is white! It is reassuring to these people, that the Nigger slur does not apply to them. It applies to the homeboys and we all know who the homeboys are.
So it is not necessary to keep this charade alive for the newly arriving immigrants. Likewise it is not necessary to continue to comfort the native born racists here in America, even if it means a reduction in pay checks available for Uncle Tom sterotype black entertainers.
But now-a-days there are East Indians and Pakistanis who are present in this country whose skin pigmentation is twice a black as Jamie Foxx, while the race listed on their official documentation (driver’s license, passport, etc) is white!
“No, no, no… The East Indians are ‘wogs.'” — Fawlty Towers
Do you honestly think suppressing a single word, will eradicate all of those cultural problems? The word is the symptom, not the problem. And shutting down dialog is never the answer.