Nigga say what?

I don’t usually stick up for conservative pundits, but Laura Schlesinger had a valid point when she talked about the use of the word “nigger.”

Black guys use it all the time. Turn on HBO, listen to a black comic, and all you hear is nigger, nigger, nigger.... I don’t get it. If anybody without enough melanin says it, it’s a horrible thing; but when black people say it, it’s affectionate.

It’s true; context is everything. Blacks also use “motherfucker” to arbitrarily indicate another individual: you hear it in street talk, it peppers Miles Davis’s autobiography, and in a book I once read documenting prison life, the glossary even defines it as “a person; not necessarily pejorative.” But I suspect it’ll be a while before it makes it to broadcast TV, just because it’s “vulgar” (not because it’s racist).

Anyway, Laura isn’t alone in not getting it (although I suspect she’s clueless about a lot of things). But I think political correctness goes too far when it decrees that not only can this epithet never be spoken, it can’t even be referenced except as “the n-word” (just like “the f-bomb”), as if the reader or listener should not under any circumstances be exposed to it. It’s kinda like when something is said that you think you’re not supposed to hear and you stick your fingers in your ears and go “la-la-la-la-la.” Even stories in the press about the Schlesinger brouhaha take pains to not spell it out; they relate how she “used the n-word” or “said ‘n*gger’” as if actually printing the succession of six letters would cause the sky to fall. It’s America’s version of not depicting the prophet Mohammed.

You-tube doesn’t have Lenny Bruce’s classic take on this, so we’ll have to settle for Dustin Hoffman’s re-creation in the biopic. I think it says it all:



So sure, we can criticize white people who call black people “niggers” (and continue to titter uneasily when blacks employ it freely). It really isn’t very nice and we ought not to use it. But pussyfooting around objectionable words strikes me as even more objectionable than using them, because it helps give them more power than they deserve.