This is from a thread I started a while ago, called "The N-Word Briefly Revisited"
Snood:
Quote:I think Lenny Bruce makes an interesting point there. IMO, his humor threw a lot of firebombs just for the sake of firebombing, but that's neither here nor there. Let me address his proposal.
Suppose, like he said, the president started using the n-word as a matter of course (okay, for the sake of our being able to suspend belief enough to see the picture, let's pretend it's someone who has a more than 2% approval rate among blacks to start with). And suppose everyone started using that word, along with "bitch", "fag", "cracker", etc...
Bruce says that in six months, the word will have lost its power, and little kids couldn't be wounded by it anymore.
It's a nice idea and now, as when he made the comment, it stirs and titillates. But it's an idea that's not anchored in reality, and I'll tell you why. For one thing, it misjudges the strength of the venom in the n-word. See, this is a word that was conceived for the sole purpose of damaging spirits - black people's spirits. It is a word created in the furnaces of raw race hate - not the George Jefferson, movin-on-up climate of honky-this and honky-that, but forged by people who killed, raped and mutilated black people with violence and impunity and government sanction. It is a word that was nurtured into further vitality by hundreds of years of explicit and implicit bigotry, Jim Crow and disenfranchisement. It is not your everyday 'bad' word. It has a singular and undeniable poison.
And for another thing, Bruce's statement conjures up a scenario that simply could not happen in America - not in the 60's, and not now. Let me say it again - white people cannot use the word freely like that. I'm not talking about political correctness here. I'm saying bluntly that the n-word is so wrong ; so imbued with the nasty poison of hundreds of years of dysfunctional, murderous history, that it cannot be ?'M-TVed' away, wished away, or said by white people - ever - as easily as it is said between blacks. It is something that just is, and everyone has to deal with it as it is.
Interesting how our stances soften or shift over time - I don't feel nearly as rigid about the whole thing as I did when I wrote that.
I read through that old thread, and I saw how prickly I was being toward Sozobe - and today I consider Sozobe one of the most thoughtful and caring people here.
Funny how things evolve, ain't it?
