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Originally Posted by Sugarsprinkles
The point is not the power or lack of power in certain words. My point is the inequity in racism. It's okay for various groups to be anti-White, but let whites express anything that even hints of racism then they're all up in arms about it. Or is it that ONLY whites can be racist? We as a society have given one group too much power to censor what other groups say or do.
And as for the "N word" as we're forced to call it.......why is it alright for them to use it, if it's so distasteful and offensive? If they don't want it used, then it should apply equally.
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It's not "alright" for "them" to use.
As a person of color I — as well as MANY people of color —*abhor its prevalent, misguided use as a term of endearment or a lazy substitute for saying "person" or "friend," or whatever other delusion the younger racial-ironic hipster set or hip-hop generation has told themselves that its use is okay because of slangy phonetic respellings or re-appropriation or reverse-engineering of a slur.
You hear it being used by "them" because those people have bought into the lie. Because certain people pay others a LOT of money to sell their dignity out and unconsciously exemplify the very word they think means nothing. If you believe that "we" are okay with this, you couldn't be more mistaken, trust me on that. I hear this word being spoken nearly every day by schoolchildren on the subway to one another, out loud and in the presence of older, non-Black people who are visibly trying to ignore them and everytime I hear this, I feel depressed and ugly, as if my brain is being disintegrated by acid into a deep vat of stupidity and pieces of my soul are crumbling away, dying.
"We" don't want it used any more that you probably don't like hearing it being said. But I can assure you the impact of hearing it hurts me a thousand times more than it would hurt you (if you are speaking as a non-Black person), including the use of words such as "whitey" and "cracker" as epithets instead of comic effect, which the n-word has NO space or buffer to be taken as. Case in point, there used to be a sitcom in the 90s called "Cracker."
Why is it used so often? The power of old negative words have very, VERY deep roots and do not die easily. Add that onto future generations growing up with readymade, addictive meme-centric mentalities and being taught that words are just letters on a screen with no weight and certain things don't really matter in a disposable moral sense as long as they are practiced in private and not in public. And the leeway shine we give celebrities (or the concept of celebrity) over our own selves and our own values sometimes is disgusting.