Here is what Lenny Bruce had to say about the N Word: “Are there any niggers here tonight? Could you turn on the house lights, please, and could the waiters and waitresses just stop serving, just for a second? And turn off this spot. Now what did he say? “Are there any niggers here tonight?” I know there’s one nigger, because I see him back there working. Let’s see, there’s two niggers. And between those two niggers sits a kyke. And there’s another kyke— that’s two kykes and three niggers. And there’s a spic. Right? Hmm? There’s another spic. Ooh, there’s a wop; there’s a polack; and, oh, a couple of greaseballs. And there’s three lace-curtain Irish micks. And there’s one, hip, thick, hunky, funky, boogie. Boogie boogie. Mm-hmm. I got three kykes here, do I hear five kykes? I got five kykes, do I hear six spics, I got six spics, do I hear seven niggers? I got seven niggers. Sold American. I pass with seven niggers, six spics, five micks, four kykes, three guineas, and one wop. Well, I was just trying to make a point, and that is that it’s the suppression of the word that gives it the power, the violence, the viciousness. Dig: if President Kennedy would just go on television, and say, “I would like to introduce you to all the niggers in my cabinet,” and if he’d just say “nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger” to every nigger he saw, “boogie boogie boogie boogie boogie,” “nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger” ’til nigger didn’t mean anything anymore, then you could never make some six-year-old black kid cry because somebody called him a nigger at school.”
I’ve written about the word “nigger” in hip hop before and I still feel that words have the power we give them and actions have their own power by which I mean, it doesn’t matter if you call a black man “Sir” when you continue to incarcerate him in such terrifying numbers. The black population should not be worrying about me singing “Nigga wha? Ain’t no nigga can fuck me with me. ” And worry about this (from here):
1. While people of color make up about 30 percent of the United States’ population, they account for 60 percent of those imprisoned.
2. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, one in three black men can expect to go to prison in their lifetime.
3. Students of color face harsher punishments in school than their white peers, leading to a higher number of youth of color incarcerated. Black and Hispanic students represent more than 70 percent of those involved in school-related arrests or referrals to law enforcement.
4. According to recent data by the Department of Education, African American students are arrested far more often than their white classmates.
5. African American youth have higher rates of juvenile incarceration and are more likely to be sentenced to adult prison.
6. As the number of women incarcerated has increased by 800 percent over the last three decades, women of color have been disproportionately represented.
7. The war on drugs has been waged primarily in communities of color where people of color are more likely to receive higher offenses.
9. Voter laws that prohibit people with felony convictions to vote disproportionately impact men of color.
10. Studies have shown that people of color face disparities in wage trajectory following release from prison.
Yep, but God help you if you use the N Word.
This social science bullshit is a little like the way Arab countries used the existence of Israel for decades. Yes, Libya, Iraq, Egypt, Syria had leaders who robbed the country blind while ignoring the infrastructure, destroying the middle class, and leaving their people illiterate and dirt poor, but, hey it is all Israel’s fault. If they weren’t there, all the problems would disappear.
The same with black people, hey I may stick you in jail for looking at me the wrong way but hey I will fight with my last editorial for you to be called “person of color”.
“Nigger” is a vile word? Actually, it isn’t a vile word. The way in which it is used is vile, the word is nothing at all. What it is is obfuscation of the first order, a place where arguments can be tilted from what should be under discussion to social engineering. The crime of the “n” word is racism but it is irrelevant compared to one in every three black man goes to jail at some point during his life time. Indeed, compared to the wholesale warehousing of black men, Sterling is MLK.
And I’ll go further, if I was black I’d insist that the politicians who govern me are forced to refer to me as a nigger. Not for Lenny Bruce’s reason, actually for the opposite reason, to keep the sting where it should be. A little history pop pickers, in the 1960s law enforcement flooded the ghettos with cheap hard drugs and when when everyone was addicted they cut off the supply. If that wasn'[t enough, they added in draconian punishment for this crime and finally brought up perhaps the most ridiculous law in American history, the three strikes you are out law. And you are worried about the use of nigger in a rap song?
When it comes to black males being incarcerated at rates so huge that the US jails more people per capita THAN ANY OTHER COUNTRY IN THE WORLD, there are a coupla possible reasons.
1. Blacks are simply bad.
2. Poverty leads to crime and a disproportionate amount of blacks are poor.
3. The government are setting them up out of (to quote Chuck D) fear of a black planet
I’ll go with # 3 for the win.
Let’s try this again. Jim Crow was hurting the black population and racism was making the States look bad, plus they were terrified of miscehgenation and the death of the white pigmented American, so the Government gave the blacks some rights, stuck them in ghettos, cut off jobs, threw in hard drugs, cut off the supply of hard drugs, made the punishment for drugs worse than the punishment for murder, and mixed. But if you call them on racism, they can claim we aren’t racists we didn’t call you nigger. We treated you with respect as we stacked the deck and threw you in jail.” Compared to the whole destruction of a so many black people, it seems like a badge of honor to call yourself and be called nigger. Let this stone cold racist scum government face the truth without beautifying it with sweet words.
