I Love You Nigga

Hey! It's N-word time again and who better to ask who can say it and who can't than another nigga. It started with Jesse Jackson in an oblique reference to Presidential aspirant Barack Obama. Only last year Jackson urged the black community to ban the word. It continued yesterday when Whoopi Goldberg claimed that by reclaiming the word black people were diminishing its power over them. Now as I understand it, being Caucasian, the epithet "nigger" has been transformed into the term of endearment "nigga," and is used by black people to express both endearment and derision depending on the context. Something like the way people use the work “fuck.” If a Caucasian uses the word it is spelled nigger. If Whoopi or another black person uses it is spelled nigga. Some blacks, and there are many who, will tell you they have heard the word all their lives. These days the word “dog” and the word “nigga” are used interchangeably as exemplified by the movie Training Day and the TV show American Idol. It is used by their friends and their families as a term of endearment and derision, and by their enemies as an insult. Ask Whoopi, she'll tell you. Richard Pryor was a champion of the word nigga and one of the first to reclaim it. His Sugar Ray Robinson routine when something like this: "If a white man and a black man are fighting, I'll always be rooting for the nigga," or "if a black man walked through my neighborhood with clothes like the ones you have on (referring to someone in the audience) saying be black and be proud, my parents would say that nigga's crazy." Yes, black people use it all the time and its okay for them, but not for others who aren’t black. Well the truth is it's not okay. And while you cannot ban words you can acculturate to a society that does not use the word. With rare exceptions it is not a word used any longer by Caucasians to describe black people in civil or public conversation. The civil rights movement and broad based Caucasian support for equality has virtually eliminated the word from the everyday vocabulary of most Caucasians. There are some exceptions, but in the grand scheme of things the word is not used very much by Caucasians. The word has not been forgotten. We just don't use it. For many it's nothing more than good manners. For Whoopi Goldberg and other black people to browbeat others into submission using the word nigger as a weapon is a poor choice. As well, using the word nigga as a term of endearment is even a poorer choice. There is nothing endearing or comforting about the word. Whether you say "I love you nigga" or "he's just a nigger with a checkbook," it's wrong. The word should be relegated to the wastebasket of history. It should be remain a remnant of a horrible past. It should not be part of a progressive future. For any black person to rationalize using the word for any purpose is shortsighted. Black people and Caucasians must remember the past, but we must not live in it.