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Talk To Me,
Michael Richards
( There’s no question that the epithet leaden tirade
Michael Richards launched at a The fall out reignited
the debate on race. And while such conversations are healthy, they need to
move in a new direction. Simply put, the N-word needs to go. It may be held
as a badge of 400 years or a term of endearment in street lingo, but it’s
still a reserved word with heavy restrictions on who can use it. If you’re
black, it’s a birth right, if you’re white, you’re a racist, or worse. I’ll never forget playing
pickup basketball at the park one summer, with a friend of mine who’s black
and played with me on the same indoor league team. We were playing on
opposite teams with people we mostly didn’t know. Trying to put one over on
me, he made a no look pass that sailed out of bounds and into the chain
linked fence that surrounded the court. The pass was intended for the
hot-shot shooter on his team who cut in the opposite direction. When I
needled him about the errant pass, he referred to his teammate, who was
within ear shot, as “My [N-word] over there….” The shooter seemed unusually
comfortable with the label. And while I knew my friend didn’t know him, I
asked the rhetorically question anyways. Of course my friend didn’t know the
shooter, and when he said so, I ask if I could apply the tag in a similar
context. My friend knew what I was up to and said that I could, but that he
didn’t care to see me get shot. To me it was the epitome
of a reserved word, where the inalienable right to use a term was dictated by
your pigment. Even Slim Shady (Eminem) the white
rapper with plenty of creed with black hip-hop artists and fans can’t use it.
And here’s the problem with it. Not only does it draw racial lines (who can
say it and who can’t) but it also perpetuates the word’s prevalence just by
being. Think of all the white kids in the ‘burbs
who listen to rap, hearing “it” artists use it repeatedly. Eventually the
word becomes hip hallway slang. It gets bandied about without even the slightest
bone of racism to it, but there it is, alive and well, like a cancerous cell
waiting to rear its ugly. What black leaders and
all leaders who call for tolerance and sensitivity, need to do is expunge the
N-word from common vernacular. Black or white, it’s too divisive and carries
too much hurtful history to be allowed any sort of selective use. What’s good
for one side of the coin should be good for the other. Ban it now,
universally, unilaterally, and move on. …and
speaking of labels, words and rights, in an earlier rant I
posted here about single sex marriage in Massachusetts and the Governor’s
push to get it to a referendum vote (the people), a friend of mine, who is
gay, pointed out that Civil Rights were not allotted by a vote, but by
legislation. An interesting point when you consider gays can vote before they
could marry and it was the inverse for African Americans. Still Civil Rights
had a groundswell of public support (debate and controversy are the tools of
democracy) and if the - TBM |
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