Author: Bob Draper
Website:
www.insured411.comEmail: info@insured411.com
Just yesterday a good white friend of mine, called me on the phone about hanging out on Saturday night. At the end of the call we reconfirmed where we would meet and the time, I then said " You got the 1st round" He replied with : "Ni***a please!" in his best black imitation, as always we both laughed and hung up the phone. After a few moments I thought about how far we had come with racism in the world. My best friend had just dropped the N word on me and I laughed as always. If this had been 20 years or more ago in the past, I would have been all over him like BBQ sauce on a rib.
I then did a search on the word Ni***r. (Notice the "R" at the end and not the "A") With out going into much detail here is what I found:
* The variants neger and negar, derive from the Spanish and Portuguese word negro (black), and from the pejorative French nègre (ni**er). Etymologically, negro, noir, nègre, and ni**er ultimately derive from nigrum, the stem of the Latin niger (black) (pronounced ['niger] which, in every other grammatical case, grammatical gender, and grammatical number besides nominative masculine singular, is nigr-, the r is trilled). I would suggest you read more on this as the article at wikipedia is very long.
When you have read more of this you can see it never started off as a racial slur, but was made into one after slaves were brought over from Africa.
My whole point of this article is why should a word hurt someone? It's funny my friend uses the word all of the time around me in jokes and I'm not offended. But if we were in a fight and and he tossed it out at me, I think we would have problems. Of course all black people can agree to this next statement. When the N word is said with a "R" at the end it makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Even if it comes from a black person. One would think it goes back to the slavery days when the master would use it addressing his slaves.
I can recall playing football in high school, Boys Town Neb. We traveled to a school about 75 miles from us, I can't remember the name of the school now as it's been so long. During our warm ups, there was a 20 foot grass hill just past the north end zone. There must have been around 50 kids form the other school sitting up there. As we were running our warm up drills, we could here chants of N***r coming from some of the kids. Our team had a nick name that we shared only with the players and coaches " Coach Spencers, Spic's, Spade's and Spud's" as we were a very racially mixed team. So just about everyone stopped and looked up at the hill. The coach yelled at us and said ignore it! If your mad show it on the field. We did go on to beat that team that day. But it was just shocking and sicking to hear that come from fans in the crowd.
Now a days, it seems that the N word is dying out for racism and people are starting to let it just become a dead word and is used mostly in comedy. Dave Chappelle has two great skits in which plays on the N word. See the videos on the left. My favorite is the "Black Blind Racist" I think it shows how dumb racism can be.
What I'm about to say here will start some controversy for sure, but what is life if there is no controversy? I think the N word should be used as freely as anyone wishes with responsibility, then this word would never be lost in our black culture. As unfortunate as it is, this word is ours to keep, embrace, hate or to love. This is my opinion and I'm sticking to it!
A parting shot from one of favorite movies:
Full Metal Jacket (1987) Gunnery Sergeant Hartman (R. Lee Ermey), "There is no racial bigotry here. We do not look down on niggers, kikes, wop or greasers, because here you are all equally worthless."
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigger