The Resurrection of "Nigger"

The Resurrection of "Nigger"

Five years ago, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and other leaders of the black community staged what had to have been one of the most fatuous exercises in the history of language: They “buried” the word “nigger.”

As with anything buried alive, the word has scratched and clawed its way to the surface once again proving that premature burial is usually not permanent or productive.

It was a selective internment anyway since most African-Americans never participated in the funeral and hip-hop “artists” never ceased using “nigger” as well as “bitch,” ”ho,” and other less-than flattering terminology toward women in their “art.”

At the 2007 ceremony in Detroit, Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick gravely intoned, “Today we’re not just burying the N-word, we’re taking it out of our spirit. We gather burying all the things that go with the N-word. We have to bury the ‘pimps’ and the ‘hos’ that go with it. Die N-word, and we don’t want to see you ’round here no more.”

Perhaps Kilpatrick wasn’t the ideal spokesman for the obsequies. He wasn’t exactly a role model either before or after he became Detroit’s mayor, what with a plethora of corruption, perjury, obstruction of justice, bribery, extortion, and fraud scandals and serving time in federal prison.

The first evidence that nigger was making a comeback fortunately didn’t happen on FOX News which would have been castigated by the left wing media had someone on FOX employed the term.

Last month, CNN special investigator Drew Griffin was reporting on an alleged hate crime in Mississippi and cited a cell phone call by one of the suspects: “At the end of this, Deryl Dedmon is laughing with his friends and actually called on a cell phone and, pardon my language but there’s no other way to say this–‘I just ran over that f—ing nigger.’ ”

Of course, there were myriad other ways of saying it but none had nearly the shock value of Griffin’s usage of a buried word.

Likewise, there were various other ways for Susan Candiotti, a CNN correspondent, to report on the recent Tulsa shootings than by quoting a Facebook entry by one of the accused on Easter Sunday: “And it reads like this: ‘Today is two years that my dad has been gone, shot by’–and please excuse the language, it’s very sensitive–‘Shot by a fucking nigger.’ “

Apologies were duly accepted for both the use of the F-word and the N-word . . . (Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=21297.)