I feel a bit like KingEd. If it's done with a sense of camraderie, who am I to argue whether it's "okay"? On the other hand, I don't feel it's ever "appropriate," if you see the difference. Every day I become more convinced that real life sucks enough and that there's no reason to go out of one's way to make it worse. I say this in the most positive light, mind you.

Without any qualifiers in that sentance, the answer is NO - it is NOT OK. If you add "black" before musicians, then it is not up to me (whitey) to make that call.

My question to Hrrundi is what does this have to do with RTH?

Randy Newman famously used the N-word in the song Rednecks -- "we're keeping the niggers down." His standard explanation is that he didn't like doing it, but he felt like he needed that word for the song's sake.

He knows, and most intelligent listeners know, that it's a character singing the song who is using the word, but not everyone does. Newman knows how dangerous the word is, so for example he doesn't play the song at venues where he knows there will be children present. I saw him play it to a concert series crowd in Birmingham, i.e., not exactly his crowd, and the chill in the room was palpable. A significant percentage of the people there had never heard the song before and didn't quite know what to make of another significant percentage whooping it up and singing along (some of whom may or may not have been in on the joke). It was deliciously uncomfortable.

The point is, don't use the word casually. It has, or should have, weight.

Normally, I'm one of those guys who believes that words have *meanings*, and that we ought to live our spoken and written lives in accordance with the understood, "written-down" meanings of those words. For me, a glacial pace of change in the definition of words is a good thing, as it helps us all understand rules of behavior when it comes to discourse. This, in my opinion, leads to a greater public peace, which is a good thing.

But I think I allow a special dispensation for bad words -- and by "bad," I mean *hateful* words -- not words about body functions and other stuff that makes us laugh or helps us vent frustrations by inappropriately throwing words about copulation and such into our day-to-day vocabulary. So I don't truck with the folks who want to preserve the explosive destructive power of the word "nigger." If lunk-headed kidz want to rob it of its meaning by using it "inappropriately" in song and conversation, more power to them. Hopefully, we'l arrive at a point where the word will lose all its meaning for everyone.

the word grates on my ears. always has.

but its use in this video is rhetorical.

it comes from the perspective of a black person who wants his fellow african americans to better themselves.

the video seems to suggest, in other words, that until young black americans educate and empower themselves by taking responsibility, by reading, then they are only as good as what slavemasters called their ancestors, the "n word", tools.

people who DO read etc., don't get called that.

the video uses the history and the force of the word to motivate.

in that context, i think it's a strong use of the word.

i could never use it that way. i actually feel physically weird even typing it, let alone quoting someone else who has said it.

The elementary school I went to was about half black, half white. The N-word was totally common parlance in my school, used by black kids almost exclusively, as a putdown that was also often part of a jovial greeting: "What you been up to, N?" "N, What's wrong with you?' stuff like that.

Here's a paragraph of a story I wrote when I was 21 and that eventually appeared in my master's thesis:

"A lot of black kids went to my elementary school but none lived in my neighborhood exactly. They all lived in much smaller houses on the other side of the railroad tracks. A few of the older, wood-shingle houses didn’t have plumbing or electricity, but those were eventually torn down. Many of the black kids didn’t do well in school, and the white teachers used to yell at them in the hallways as though they didn’t like them. A few of the black kids were mean but most weren’t and they were always calling each other nigger in loud friendly voices. I asked my mother what a nigger was and she told me never to use the word again, especially around the black kids. I asked her why they all lived in such small houses on the other side of the tracks and she said that once people had forced them to live there, but nobody believed in things like that anymore."

I read the story aloud to audiences several times, and once afterwards a black audience member did criticize me for using it, while several other black audience members at different times said they found the paragraph interesting.

So it's hard for me to answer the question in some kind of blanket way. I'd say, though, like all racial epithets, the crucial issue is context. Of course, in music, it's easier to take lyrics out of context than it is in a story, since you don't necessarily hear all the lyrics. You shout out that word in a song, and most times people aren't going to care about the context.

But since the word will never lose its power, I'm afraid that the best option is for it to ultimately disappear. That will take a long time. Still, nobody says "Thou" any more either.

Saturnismine wrote:

it comes from the perspective of a black person who wants his fellow african americans to better themselves.

Yeah, but is that any more productive than telling your son, "Be a man, pussy!" Does an entire song's worth of that message help anyone want to read?

people who DO read etc., don't get called that.

So we'd like to believe - and so I'd like to believe that people who read DON'T call others that. You see what I mean?

mechanically, linguistically, syntactically, your "pussy" sentence functions the same way. but not contextually. effeminate young males weren't enslaved for 400 years (at least not the same way Africans who had been brought over here in the slave trade were). as for whether or not it's more productive, however, i don't know. i have no idea how it could be measured. i think you're right to raise the question. if it wasn't an entire song's worth of it, but a smaller quantity, would you be more okay with it?

as far as my "people who DO read, etc., don't get called that" statement, I wasn't saying I think that's true. I was paraphrasing what I think the song is trying to say.

please let's not talk past each other on this.

if it wasn't an entire song's worth of it, but a smaller quantity, would you be more okay with it?

If the "friendly" insult was thrown out there one time I wouldn't think too hard about it. I might still feel uncomfortable upon hearing the phrase, but I use the conditional tense. Shouted out repeatedly, there's no conditional tense about how I feel.

I know you were trying to paraphrase what the song was about. I would think you're correct in that analysis. It's still a pretty dysfunctional way of encouraging kids to read, wouldn't you say?

there's no question that it's a dysfunctional way to encourage kids to read...

i mean, my analysis -- only hesitantly in favor of the use of the word here -- was academic. and i'm coming from the perspective of someone who really passionately feels that knowledge is power, and that that's getting lost in our culture. so i was bringing my own ideology to it.

coming from a less favorable perspective, and i think i might feel beat down by that.

shocking or pissing off people into doing something ALWAYS has to be accounted for and explained later.

and it doesn't always get results.

I prefer Schoolhouse Rock.