The N Word: Just like Grandma made

There has been a lot of fuss recently about the word ‘nigger’. Nigger, not to be confused Niger, the uranium exporting African country, is a pejorative word referencing people of African descent. Latin for “black”, the word nigger has traveled a myriad of dialects throughout the last five hundred years, assuming different spellings and often retaining completely different definitions.

During the 1970's our country made a conscious choice to step away from the soft-sell racist terms it embraced to please the mid-century liberals, such as ‘negro’ and ‘colored people’. Bigots, once stripped of the only denigrating and disunifying words that held a socially acceptable status, made their way back to the original.

Racism is alive and well in America today, thriving on more than mere words, staunchly populating the agendas of the most powerful people in the country. It is no secret that the rich and powerful have kept minorities as poor and quiet as possible throughout American history. Our media is more sensitive than ever to the most minute of injustices, but only because it keeps sponsors filthy rich and perceivably guiltless.

The debates rage across the internet regarding what is or isn’t racist. Pundits weigh in on every news show whether they know the situation or not. But what people really want is for race-involved discussions, music and language to just disappear, never again reminding them of what they believe is our past. But racism is not our past. Instead, it is very much so our future.

You can’t change people. Nobody wakes up in the middle of the night and decides to discontinue parts of their childhood-learned or subconsciously assimilated vernacular because of a rally, a protest or a boycott. Just as well, you can’t make somebody racist who doesn’t already have an innate hatred of the given race. No board game, book or movie is going to turn an accepting individual into a hate-filled monster.

Racism is never going away because we continually take more steps back than we do forward. If Americans really wanted racism to disappear they wouldn’t have made such poorly thought out, over-reactionary choices. We wouldn’t be in near the mess we are in if we avoided the dubious errors of creating laws that distinguish hate crimes and over publicizing small racist comments. But it was the change they didn’t stop that caused irreparable damage.

The biggest mistake we made as a country was allowing the black community to attempt to desensitize the word ‘nigger’ by using the hell out of it. Where is the logic in that? And I am sick of hearing non-black people regurgitating the same stupid argument of “why can they use it and we can’t?”. These folks are average, boring magoos that want to use a slur like marijuana; in secret - away from the cops and as shock value to liven up their meaninglessness. Trust me, the people that want to use it are using it.

Why would a government allow 30% of their population to use, promote, embrace and scream freely their own racial slur, yet glare evilly at the remaining population, ready to drop a heavier hand than usual if they even think about using it? They expect tolerance from all but are distributing the punishment disproportionately. We should stop promoting tolerance because it only turns racism underground where it can brood and disseminate quietly, giving only the appearance of declining racism.

What disgust me is that the people who want to end racism are afraid of going to the root of the problem, because that would cross lines with their other liberal oaths of allowing privacy, not interfering with personal lives and being accepting of those with differences. Well, fuck that.

Racism begins, and is perpetuated, in three places:

1. The Home
I loved my grandmother more than anybody in the world. Just thinking about the years she had lived, the wars she saw and the many who had passed before her, I would crumble into tears of affection and respect. She was an icon to me; a pillar of postmodern survival and an encyclopedia of domestic solutions. So you can imagine my surprise the time she shared a can of mixed nuts with me, expressing the “nigger toes” to be her favorite. Although I too shared a fondness for Brazil nuts, I now also understood the ease with which an old-fashioned term can roll off the tongue twenty years past its relevance.

How do you stop racism in the home? Normally I would suggest genocide, but as we are learning in Iraq, wiping out part of a country’s population only makes the rest of the country really fucking pissed off, even those “tolerant” of our nation’s freedoms. You can’t stop racism in the home. It is a virus that feeds off its host’s lack of education and compassion. Essentially, as long as there are stupid people in the world, there will be racism... unless you want to round them all up in trailer parks and set them ablaze: senators, radio hosts, bounty hunters, and rednecks all ablaze in a modern day Sodom and Gomorrah.

2. Your Environment
In every locker room in America there is at least one guy always ranting on, “nigger” this, “honky” that, it was this “spooks” fault, stupid “white boy” did it. One guy is saying it, but many are silently agreeing and the rest are not opposing the repulsiveness of it.

Every job I’ve ever had included at least one person ballsy enough to wear their hatred on their sleeve. Because I live in a predominantly white area, I see rampant black and Mexican degradation. Having grown up in a mixed urban area, I witnessed a heavier taunting of whites and Asians. We are products of our environment, souls searching for truths and accepting anything we are told is right.

3. In Fear
(Black people, I realize you have suffered enough but unfortunately this question isn’t for you) Have you ever been on a New York City subway after dark? If you were, what were you most afraid of? If you have never been, what is your biggest fear? Film and television have almost exclusively reserved nighttime subway riding footage for muggings and killings by black people.

It seems cliche, but the most racist people I know never really cared about our cultural differences until they were scared into hatred. One good beat down, rape or robbery by someone of another race is often all that is needed to jumpstart bigotry. What else could you find to be angry about if there was no rhyme or reason to your attack? If you get beat up or raped a lot, then perhaps you can dissect the subtle differences between each and locate the attackers true motive. Otherwise, these are singular cases leaving the victim convinced that “insert slur(s) are a bunch of insert type of criminal.”

How is this for an option, America? If a public personality makes racist comments on or off the air, remove them quietly and blacklist them across the board. If a musician uses a racist word in their music, remove them from the label and do not release the song; blacklist them across the industry. Consider a crime as just a crime, whether it is prompted by racial hatred or not. Tell your friends and family that they are not welcome to use that type of language in front of you, and do not relent when they put you on defense for their own issues. Do these sound like viable solutions?

If someone calls you a bad name, deal with it. Grow the fuck up and realize that life is not going to be the way you envisioned it. The world is too big. Humans are too diverse within our cultures and environments to voluntarily accept aggregate change unless it benefits us financially. The government will never regulate our thoughts. The fact is, no amount of protesting would ever have made my grandmother give a shit what the name of a nut is, and there was no word in the world she could have called them that would have hurt my feelings