If this makes folks mad, sorry. It’s been bugging me since there was a conversation about it…
Someone wanted to know why, since some black people use the "n-word", everyone can’t without being identified as a racist. The short answer is easy: racists are still using it.
But I don’t understand why anyone who isn’t black and doesn’t see him or herself as a racist would want to use a word with such an ugly history attached to it ?
As to why some black people use it among themselves (I don’t), I know the reasoning. I don’t agree with it, but I know what it is: supposedly using the word takes the "power" out of it. Newsflash: it doesn’t. And that’s why the popular wisdom is, you can’t use it if you’ve never been called it (in a disparaging way) yourself.
Personally, I hate the word, and I wish everyone would delete it from their vocabularies. It will never mean what some people want to make it mean—not any form of it.
But I don’t understand why anyone who isn’t black and doesn’t see him or herself as a racist would want to use a word with such an ugly history attached to it ?
As to why some black people use it among themselves (I don’t), I know the reasoning. I don’t agree with it, but I know what it is: supposedly using the word takes the "power" out of it. Newsflash: it doesn’t. And that’s why the popular wisdom is, you can’t use it if you’ve never been called it (in a disparaging way) yourself.
Personally, I hate the word, and I wish everyone would delete it from their vocabularies. It will never mean what some people want to make it mean—not any form of it.
