Get in Where Ya Fit In:

THE "N WORD".... Shhh....

Either way it got me thinking about the issue and truthfully I'm of mixed opinions on the subject. I have a lot of "hip" white friends (tongue planted firmly in check) who like to ask questions about black culture. Unfortunately our society is still very segregated (Not legally. Just based off when it was legal) so blacks get a lot of their info on whites from TV and I think whites get even more which is never gonna be accurate. Not a knock on my white friends but I guessing this occurs a lot... A minority culture is often acutely aware of the majority culture, even obsessed with it to a degree. The majority culture is often oblivious to anything outside of their culture.

So I get a lot of hesitant, and probing questions like; "Ummm... Mark, I was just wondering .... Umm.... Why do uh ..... black people you know...... call each other.... ummm.... Nigger?". Well first of all, no black person I've ever heard of calls anybody a Nigger. We use the term nigga. It's taking a word and re-branding it. Second, I'm assuming the majority of white people know the answer but I'll explain it to the one's who don't since I still occasionally get the question. Since blacks were treated so awfully in this country for so long, that word was a potent symbol of all that discrimination and oppression. When the time came for a lot of lifting of the most heinous of these forms of racism, the word was turned back in on itself and used as a badge of honor and repudiation. Basically saying, I've taken your worst and survived it. You can't use that word as a weapon to bludgeon us anymore. Kinda noble in a way. Let's call that the "old school nigga" but I'll get back to that. I occasionally use the term in the "old school" way by which I simply mean a person who lived through the hard times of racism and overcame it and what that communal experience entailed.

Now once that is answered, (inexplicably in my mind) the next question is always well since you guys say it, why can't I? The sentence is never phrased that way of course. It's always asked in another context, but that's what is really meant. Why are you able to say something I can't?

Excellent post.

…Let's fast forward to the late 80's and early 90's and what I call the "New School" usage of nigga. Basically what America, and black people in particular found out is that you can't reverse the effect of hundreds of years of racism in a nice 20 year little span. Being the pessimist that I am, it's gonna take centuries of dedication to fix centuries of hate, but that's just my opinion.