I’d like to see the disappearance of the N word from Black people’s mouth in 2012. Actually, let”s start right now. I want people to stop referring to each other as “my nigger” and saying things like “sup nigger”.
The N word has been used for centuries to abuse and denigrate Black people. In the late 80s, certain misguided African Americans decided they would reclaim the word back for black people. Negro please! What was there to reclaim? When I hear the N word I think of Black people being lynched and whipped. It is still used today to abuse us and we shouldn’t be using it to identify each other.
If you call me a ni**er I will slap you upside your head!
If we are in the reclaiming business why not own the following:
- coon
- chocolate drop
- black jack
- blackie
- darky
- coloured
- nig nog
- spade
- wog
- chalkie
It’s full time we recognise how extremely stupid we look as a race when we use the N word.
When I hear the N word in a song, I just think what a missed opportunity. Couldn’t the artist come up with a better word? I love poetry, and music is poetry to me. When a lyricist uses the N word he’s selling out as far as I’m concerned. If you are lyrically gifted words have power, why dilute them by using that stupid word?
If you disagree that using the N word is sell out behaviour, leave a comment otherwise spread the word. Tell your people to tell their people, we don’t put each other down like that no more. Each one teach one.
In the second edition (1965) of ‘A Dictionary of Modern English Usage’, it states:”N.(Nigger) has been described as ‘the term that carries with it all the obloquy (abuse) and contempt and rejection which whites have inflicted on blacks.’ ”
I don’t buy the justification that some black folk have neutralised the N-Word and its effects by claiming it as a term of solidarity and brotherhood. The National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) condemn the use of the term among African-Americans, yet it still pervades in African American subculture. It smacks to me of a wallowing in the aftermath of trauma; a nursing, rehearsing, rather than a dispersing.
Ironically, gangsta rap artists have effectively prostituted the legacy of black oppression making the iconography of the debasing N-Word and its rotten bedfellows ‘Drugs’, ‘Money’ and ‘Violence’, lucrative in Capitalism’s Marketplace of the Gaudy and the Profane.
Many would say that the continued use of the N-Word is destroying the black community and arresting its progress; and that it perpetrates racial self-loathing. Yet, rather tellingly, I think, it highlights a sharp conflict of position in the black community. Moreover, if we set aside the hyperbole and lose the melodrama, it highlights something as banal as a generation gap in the black community, which is a dynamic present in every age and in every community.
Good luck trying to educate the massive. A lot of black people are ignorantly following trends and don’t think for themselves. If a rapper says it’s okay to say the N word then their ‘on it’.