Here's a bit from Scabrous Joe and Mika The Attack Bunny - along with other MSNBC Meat Puppets - saying how can we expect these fine innocent teenagers not to behave like racist assholes when it's so obvious that all those rotten hip-hopsters are putting out all those horrible rap songs that use the n-word and kill this muthuhfuckuh and bang that bitch and blah blah blah.
Aside from the standard bullshit trying to make this all about Respectability Politics (tell it, Brother Jay - from way back when)...
...and aside from more of the standard bullshit trying to make some stoopid point about 'reverse racism', maybe we could look at why all the white folk gettin' all bent outa shape.
I think I hear something along the lines of "well, if black people can call each other nigger, then why can't we call 'em niggers?"
That's a question that comes from way down deep in the bottomless well of White Privilege.
Look, guys - I'm not likely to be brutalized and/or murdered by the cops just because I was driving at night in a nice neighborhood. I'm not gonna get Red-Lined by the mortgage companies; I'm not gonna be the suspect in a string of crimes because my facial features and my skin tone fit some artificial profile manufactured by a "justice system" that's become cynical and corrupt. And there's a shitload more examples of built-in prejudice once you start thinking about it.
Secondly, the use of any of the words available to us has to be subject to scrutiny from a standpoint of what relationship we have with the people we're trying to communicate with. If you sidle up beside your wife, and you give her a little squeeze on the buns and a peck on the cheek, and you say, "Hey babe - wanna get laid tonite?", you're just trying to be playful or romantic or provocative or whatever. If you do that with somebody's teenaged daughter, you don't get to be all huffy and indignant when they take exception to it and start pounding you down into a greasy spot with a piano leg.
So after all that; knowing what Privilege allows for The Privileged, and what it does not allow for those Un-Privileged, can't we let up on the idiot notion of being so fucking privileged that we insist on "What's mine is mine and what's yours is mine too"?
Can't we give black folk one lousy word that they get to own and the rest of us just get to stay the fuck away from it?
Aside from the standard bullshit trying to make this all about Respectability Politics (tell it, Brother Jay - from way back when)...
...and aside from more of the standard bullshit trying to make some stoopid point about 'reverse racism', maybe we could look at why all the white folk gettin' all bent outa shape.
I think I hear something along the lines of "well, if black people can call each other nigger, then why can't we call 'em niggers?"
That's a question that comes from way down deep in the bottomless well of White Privilege.
Look, guys - I'm not likely to be brutalized and/or murdered by the cops just because I was driving at night in a nice neighborhood. I'm not gonna get Red-Lined by the mortgage companies; I'm not gonna be the suspect in a string of crimes because my facial features and my skin tone fit some artificial profile manufactured by a "justice system" that's become cynical and corrupt. And there's a shitload more examples of built-in prejudice once you start thinking about it.
Secondly, the use of any of the words available to us has to be subject to scrutiny from a standpoint of what relationship we have with the people we're trying to communicate with. If you sidle up beside your wife, and you give her a little squeeze on the buns and a peck on the cheek, and you say, "Hey babe - wanna get laid tonite?", you're just trying to be playful or romantic or provocative or whatever. If you do that with somebody's teenaged daughter, you don't get to be all huffy and indignant when they take exception to it and start pounding you down into a greasy spot with a piano leg.
So after all that; knowing what Privilege allows for The Privileged, and what it does not allow for those Un-Privileged, can't we let up on the idiot notion of being so fucking privileged that we insist on "What's mine is mine and what's yours is mine too"?
Can't we give black folk one lousy word that they get to own and the rest of us just get to stay the fuck away from it?
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