Much Ado about "Nigger". Michael Richards, who played "Kramer" on the TV sitcom Seinfeld, got himself into a great big helping of hurt when he exploded in rage at black hecklers and repeatedly shouted "the N-word" at them. Indignant "African Americans" — or is that supposed to be hyphenated: "African-Americans"? — or "blacks" or "Afro-Americans" or "Negroes" or "Colored People" or "nigras" or "niggas" or "darkies" or what-have-you — exploded in indignation! A crime against humanity! Grow the f*k up.
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I live in a predominantly black neighborhood within a majority-black American city that has a brite young black mayor, a former Rhodes scholar. Anyone who is around blacks of other than the highest socioeconomic classes is going to hear the word "nigger" — if pronounced "nigga" — ENDLESSLY. It is in hiphop music. It is on the bus. It is dropped casually on the street, without regard to who might be around. What is the big deal?
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Oh, Michael Richards is white! My my my my my! How awful. A 'honky' dared to say "the N-word". Oh, shut the f*k up!
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Straight people are now using the word "queer" as tho it is perfectly unexceptionable, completely acceptable to all gay men, even tho 3/4 of us find it EXTREMELY offensive. We essentially NEVER use it for ourselves, among ourselves. Oh, maybe, on isolated occasions, we will ask close friends, of someone, "Is he queer?" But that's rare. The word "queer" pretty much NEVER comes into the conversation among gay men, and had NEVER been used for lesbian women at all, ever, until lesbians decided to hide themselves in the great gay mass of homosexual men, and maladjusted faggots (a word we DO use for self-despising, antihomosexual losers who wish they weren't gay) permitted that. Many gay men have never outgrown their childhood feeling that they are absolutely alone, unique in the world, the only person in history who has ever wanted his own gender. Even decades after they should fully have appreciated that there are tens of millions of us in the U.S. alone, and hundreds of millions on planet Earth, they continue to cast about desperately and indiscriminately to find allies so they don't feel so alone in "the struggle". They especially seek out female allies, to camouflage their homoSEXual nature and MIS(S)represent their sexuality as, for all practical purposes, male lesbianism, and thus unobjectionable nothingness — since lesbianism is more urban myth than pounding sexual imperative, and straight society doesn't feel threatened by lesbianism. Some straight men supposedly find lesbianism sexually exciting, even tho of course genuine lesbianism would exclude them completely.
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Some stupid, extremely young homos have given implied permission to uninformed straight people to call gay men "queer". But no one has given white (or Oriental or Amerindian) people permission to call black people "nigger".
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And that's the only difference.
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The ordinarily excellent TV sitcom Girlfriends — what the heck happened to Toni?; did the actress want out, so the show wrote her out by sending her off to New York, a continent away from her Girlfriends in L.A.? — had an episode in which one of those extremely rare weird white people who plays at being black was singing along with a song that was playing on the radio, when the word "nigga" came on and she had the unmitigated gall to sing along! The nerve of the stupid white bitch! How dare you sing along with the words of a song that everyone around you is permitted to speak? What kind of psychotic racist are you?
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Answer: not psychotic, not racist. "Nigga", "nigger", "darky", "nigrah", and every other variation on that theme are just words. They mean nothing but what people bring to them. "Blacks" — who have been, at various times in the recent past, subjected to enormous pressure to call themselves "African(-)American" and demand that everyone else do the same — have changed what they tell others they want to be called, several times. They moved from "nigger" (Southern white usage) to "Negro" (capital-N, dignified racial classification), to "Afro-American", to "black", to "person of color" to "African(-)American". What next? "African", without the "American"? "Third World"? "Earth-toned"? What? How are white people to keep up? How, indeed, are 'black' people to keep up?
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The problem is not the words. The problem is the attitudes. White people don't care what anyone calls them, because they're proud to be white. Call us "honky"? That's fine with us. Call us ANYTHING, and we'll be content, because we are content to be who and what we are. "Pinky"? Fine. We're pink, many of us. "Paleface"? "Whitey"? "Washed-out"? Call us anything you like. We are glad to be white, and anything that reflects our whiteness reflects proudly on us, because we are PROUD to be white.
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If blacks were proud to be black, they would REVEL in every single term that emphasizes their blackness. They would GLORY in every inventive adjective that tells the world they are black.
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Their problem has been that they are running not from a word but from their race.
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"Honky bastard"? The "honky" part doesn't bother us at all. The "bastard" part might or might not. "Nigger bastard!", however, seems to evoke rather stronger feelings.
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The problem with any euphemism is that it is a stand-in for the correct description, and it is accurate description that is the problem for people who wish to evade being identified as part of a group they despise, or feel others might despise.
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"Sticks and stones / May break my bones / But names will never hurt me." But somehow "nigger", and "queer" still do hurt.
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Thus the indignation articulated live on CNN Headline News yesterday afternoon by black Americans at Michael Richards' rant.
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Last nite, Richards apologized abjectly on Letterman. I saw the interview from beginning to end. He had lost control, flown into a rage, and said things about one person that the whole black community then gleefully projected onto themselves, so many black people in this country being gluttons for punishment who eagerly scoop up insults to add to their collection. Richards didn't say, "I wasn't talking to you or about you", but let all black people (by whatever name they like today) feel he WAS talking about each and every one of them rather than about some rude hecklers and audience members talking loudly among themselves and interfering with his act.
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Listen, babies — and I do mean "babies": words are words, not rocks nor punches nor bullets nor nooses. Just words. You want to call me a "faggot"? That reflects badly on you, not me. I am GLAD to be gay. I wouldn't be straight for all the tea in China (that's a dated idiom, I admit; my parents used it for this and that). There is no amount of money that would make me even TRY to "convert". I love being gay. Love it. I'm proud of it. Were there a "straight pill", I would not take it. Never in a million years would I want to be heterosexual. I would literally rather die.
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So altho it irritates the hell out of me when maladjusted fruits tell people it's okay to call gay men "queer", at end I don't much care. Call me "queer", "fag", "fruit", or anything else specific to homosexual MEN. That's fine. But don't insult my manhood. I am a homosexual MAN.
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If I were black and somebody called me "nigger", I might be a tad irritated, but I'd have heard the word, pronounced "nigga", at least 30,000 times, by my own people. You'd think such endless repetition would have desensitized people to this silly six-letter word.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,867 — for Israel.)




- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:02 AM