J. C. Dante
Outsourcing Scrutiny
Sat Oct 4 12:20:17 2003
67.30.13.8

The 'N' word - anything but black and white- Right to free Speech, free association, right to speak the Truth.

It's either the most viciously racist word in the English language or a rich term of endearment. How has the "N" word come to have so many different meanings?

Chuck D abhors the use of the word as a term of affection
"If white boys doing well, it's success
When I start doing well, it's suspect."

The lyrics are from rapper Mos Def's Mr Nigga, attacking society's distrust of black men who do well for themselves.

It carries the refrain: "Mr Nigga, Nigga, Nigga."

Ironically though, when it comes to using the controversial "N" word, Mos Def's line about the inequality between white and black can be turned on its head.

Many would say it's ok for a black person to speak it, but for a white person, it is definitely "suspect".

In the words of veteran rapper Ice T: "If you are it, you can use it." Yet many other black people would shudder at the mere whisper of it.


It's a funny word... a bad word... it's very twisted

Singer Ashanti


Hear the 1Xtra documentary
Surely, no other word in the English language can provoke such polarised reactions as "nigger", which is still widely seen as about the most vicious term of racist abuse there is.

Four years ago a (white) local government official in Washington DC was forced to resign for uttering "niggardly" in public. The word is not even related to "nigger" and the official was later reinstated.

In Britain, it could even be illegal - interpreted as an incitement to racial hatred.

Yet to some, especially in the US, it has actually become a term of affection between black men, the equivalent of "mate", "pal" or "buddy".

Political rap lyric

A new BBC radio documentary highlights how the word has been reinvented - some would say reclaimed - by the black community over the past 15 years.


Lopez broke the 'If you are it, you can use it' rule
The influence of black urban music has been at the centre of this recasting, with political rappers such as KRS-1 blazing the trail.

"KRS-1 always used it in the context of looking at it in a negative state of mind," says Chuck D, frontman with one of the most influential rap outfits ever, Public Enemy.

But it was groups like NWA - Niggaz With Attitude - who promoted a positive use of the word, in a effort to wrong-foot racists.

"They said if you are going to call me one, then I am one," says Chuck D.

Incredibly, the notorious "N" word gradually became accepted as a term of endearment between black friends.

Today, even black artists who are labelled more conscientious, such as soul singer Angie Stone, have adopted the term. "I don't have a problem with it," says Stone, "as long as it's used in an affectionate way."

Historical baggage

Yet other black people remain astounded how an infamous racial slur can be bandied around so freely among those it was used to insult.


Prof Randall Kennedy: 'It's the most infamous racial slur'
"People use it but have no idea about the historical baggage," says Professor Randall Kennedy (right), author of Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word.

But confusion over use of the word doesn't stop there. Some argue its new found respectability is down to the difference in spelling - hip hop artists end the word with an "a" rather than "er".

And the fall-out over its use in Quentin Tarrantino's film Pulp Fiction - it got 15 mentions - highlighted how many consider the word ok when it is issued from black lips, but not those of a white person. Tarrantino wrote the script and speaks the word in a cameo role in the film.

Last year the same row was resurrected when Latino singer Jennifer Lopez spoke the "N" word in a track she recorded with black artist Ja Rule.

But the comments of rapper Pharoah Monch reveal how perhaps too much is being read into the word's new-found popularity.

For Monch, much of the word's appeal lies in its phonetic quality, and the fact it rhymes well.

"Sometimes I'll go over my words to find a better word, other times I'll just leave it there because phonetically, it fits."




B-B-B-B-Bad to the Bone



We shall not cease from exploration, ---- and the end of our travels will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. Who said that? I cannot retrieve it for the life of me. This single fragment of prose reveals a great wisdom at its source, and it's been popping up in my head, rattling around and coloring my view for months now.

How many times have we heard that no matter how much we resist, by the time we reach 30 years, we will have begun to turn into our mothers and fathers. Look at the back of your hands. Look at your beliefs. It's just another of those pesky universals that we ignore, regret, resist or forget, yet they arrive on schedule, to bite us on the behind, while we assure ourselves that "we already knew that". I decided to skip mom and get right to the business of turning into my grandmother, since my eyeglasses are already hopelessly lost on my head and I cannot exit the grocery without emptying my bag in search of the keys in my pocket. I've condensed all the files in my head, yet still lack the space for any new numbers since my youngest acquired a new set of three.

Our lives are bursting with accumulated knowledge, yet so much is forgotten. Life would be easier if we could somehow agree on a few accepted truths and build from there, without the necessary self-sifting demanded by each succeeding generation, and by each new wave of immigrants who challenge and redefine our philosophical landscape. There is tremendous benefit to a homogenous culture of shared knowledge and belief systems, where we build on that which we have already agreed. Why must each of us spend the better part of our youth rediscovering that kites rise highest against the wind or that effective leadership requires example rather than privilege? These are no-brainers, which should have been written in stone a few thousand years ago and taught to each generation from birth.

But I was born to a generation who so mistrusted any "prevailing wisdom" that we dubbed ourselves Heresies/R/Us for the better part of a century. We boomers are a dreadful lot. Talk about reinventing the wheel…and at what cost? We've spent 5 decades of noisy self-discovery, only to arrive back where we started. Such a waste. And Boomer Dems are just the worst of the worst. These Utopian buzzards have just about destroyed the place tinkering with the rules on everything from mom, dad, sister, brother, up, down, in, out, good, bad, relative and absolute. While we wandered Mr. Rogers neighborhood in search of equality of results, wheel chair access to roller coasters and a food chain without violence to animals, our blood enemies have been dismantling what's left of the republic and selling it off for parts.

Witness the following heresies offered to an African audience…..

"With most African countries still only tottering on their feet and many close to collapse, some people ask whether the problem is due to Africa's colonial experience or inherent adequacies of the African? …Whatever may have been the shortcomings of colonial rule, the overall effect was positive for Africa. Sure, the colonial powers exploited Africa's natural resources but on balance, colonialism reduced the economic gap between Africa and the West, the apologists argue. Colonialism laid the seeds of the intellectual and material development in Africans. It brought enlightenment where there was ignorance. It suppressed slavery and other barbaric practices such as pagan worship and cannibalism. Formal education and modern medicine were brought to people who had limited understanding or control of their physical environment. …Warring communities were united into modern nation-states with greater opportunity of survival in a competitive world than the numerous mini entities that existed before. Africa is in political and economic turmoil today, because it failed to take advantage of its inheritance from colonial rule. It was, they summarize, Africa's inadequacies that made colonization necessary and the outcome of post-independence self-rule suggests that the withdrawal by the colonial powers was premature."

Who said this? David Duke? Some arrogant white European? No, Tunde Obadina, director of Africa Information Business Services wrote the above. It seems we have come full circle on the "problem" of Africans, their prospects and their limitations. When a Nigerian governor commented that Africans were simply incapable of solving their problems, an old man in the audience stood up and said "Since you and other black leaders have tried your best but have not been able to improve the lives of us ordinary people, why don't we ask the whites to come back. When the white man ruled us things were not this bad. Please ask them to come and save us." The statement, spoken with sincerity, met momentary silence in the audience followed by some laughter and then applause. Africa has come full circle.

International football star George Weah, apparently exasperated by the anarchy and hopeless condition of his homeland, told the New York Times in May 1996: "The United Nations should come in and take over Liberia, not temporarily, but for life. To make Liberians believe in democracy, to make us believe in human rights." For his outspokenness, two of Weah's female cousins were raped and his house burnt down by gunmen from one of the warring factions that had for six years turned Liberia into a killing field.

Rape, institutional pedophilia, and anti-intellectualism are the unspoken triplets, which haunt the continent, are endemic to African culture, and remain relatively unspoken in polite discussions of why we can't "fix" black Americans. The more of Africa we imported, the more African we have become. We have had some success civilizing the African, but overall, the exercise has been an unmitigated failure, leaving our cities in ruins, our political landscape littered and broken, overwhelmed by the values of a black America unwilling or unable to comport itself in ways our Puritan Fathers would have required. It only takes one trip to Africa to figure this out, yet 20th century Utopians have successfully silenced and shamed Americans into a mantra of nurture, not nature as the architect of our souls.

Election fraud in black Philadelphia is now a given, wholly irreversible, and part of every election cycle, because we allowed black Americans to takeover the birthplace of democracy we fled for our children and our lives. The population is less than 1.3 million, with 1 million registered voters. That figure implies there are almost no children and all the adults are civic-minded. The election turnout was 70% on November 7, with some black precincts reporting 100% turnout, with 99% for Algore, who carried the city by 300,000 votes. That's roughly 500,000 to 200,000. The explanation from Republicans who live there is that there are so few Republicans that all the precinct workers are Democrats, and thereby "irregularities" occur in every election. Philadelphia is now Liberia. Detroit is Nigeria. And parts of Chicago operate not unlike the Sudan. Why did we have to learn this again?

Five out of six black Americans have an IQ below the average white person. Not talking about the consequence of this inequality has not made it go away. And increased immigration by even more illiterate third world refugees HAS made the plight of black America worse. There are only so many ways to alleviate the suffering of a permanent underclass with double digit IQ's. Increased competition from newly arrived entry level workers has satisfied the domestic needs of the leftist intelligentsia, but has exacerbated the problem of the welfare state as fewer and fewer options are available to blacks who cannot and will not conform to conservative expectations for self control and self help. It simply is NOT in their genes. For every success story, there are a thousand failures because we have learned then ignored, regretted, resisted and forgotten the truth of human biodiversity.

To put it simply, we are black and white because our genetic coding has been separate and unequal for a loooong---long time. Whites are white because they have spent many lifetimes in cold climates, and out of necessity developed tools, organization and cooperation, which is woefully absent in equatorial races. We are different people, with different cultures and differing abilities. To the fool who mutters to himself that "not ALL blacks are dumb, violent and uncivilized", --- let me just add this. Generalizations are on their face unfair and unkind to the individual. Yet generalizations are valid and are by definition, more true than not. The proper grasp of generalizations is how this species made it to the top of the food chain…and stayed there. The argument of the aberrant success story for a small percentage of blacks is just that -an aberration. It does nothing to help our desperate situation, and undermines any effort to reverse the self-evident failure of blacks as a group to organize beyond tribalism or achieve any level of self-control or governance anywhere, and at any time in history.

We are saddled with a bunch of them. There is nothing to do but hash out our differences and reach back to our roots for guidance. We achieve nothing by pretending that our differences are cosmetic, for they are not. Melanin does not cause bestiality, incest, violence and sloth. African culture does. The Africans, Latinos, and Latvians who live among us will either continue to poison the well of American values or we will convert them. But the time for Disney solutions is past. The introduction of Swedish mores to America in the late fifties may have been a welcome sexual revolution for Jewish American intellectuals in the theater, but it was a disaster for low IQ Negresses without the cognitive abilities to make informed reproductive choices. The remedies for poor reproductive choices should have been swift and final.

You breed. You feed. You don't. We won't. Kites rise highest against the wind. And don't eat yellow snow.

But it is wrong to hate Africans. There but for the grace of [add deity or geography] go any of us. Save your scorn for Boomers. Go spit on Roosevelt's grave. Punch a socialist today. Then dust off a copy of anything by GK Chesterton, Calvin Coolidge, HL Mencken, Ayn Rand, John Calvin or Frederic Bastiat and read it, scream it, live it.

Keep your mind ever on the stars, but let your eyes watch over your footsteps, lest you fall into the mire by reason of your upward gaze.®