Society’s obsession with the ‘n-word’ ignores the actual points plaguing black communities & encourages racial division

A number of public figures have landed in sizzling water within the final week for utilizing the ‘n-word’ within the context of condemning its use. Such an absurd catch-22 is emblematic of a sick society during which wokeness is used to regulate conduct.

Maybe probably the most infamous racial slur within the English language, the “n-word” is mostly thought of anathema in US and UK society. That is 2020; we’re presupposed to have moved past utilizing race and ethnicity as insults.

However the pre-Civil Rights period is resurfacing in unusual methods: ‘woke’ agitators are pushing for the whole lot from reinstituting segregation in colleges to purging controversial figures from historical past, all within the identify of (supposedly) bettering race relations.

As a substitute of creating race irrelevant, as civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. hoped to do, they’ve appointed it a very powerful attribute that may outline an individual. Accordingly, racial slurs have been elevated from venal to mortal sin, and the n-word has as soon as once more turn into a lightning rod for controversy.

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Two white BBC presenters have been excoriated on social media final week for utilizing the dreaded phrase, despite the fact that each broadcasts roundly condemned its use and integrated loads of warning and context. In a single case, it was a historic quote from Abraham Lincoln’s murderer John Wilkes Sales space that set off the woke alarm, from a program that aired in 2019 with no points. Regardless of being prefaced with a ‘well being warning’ and offering some worthwhile historic context on why Sales space would possibly go on to shoot Lincoln, the usage of the phrase was deemed inexcusable, and presenter Lucy Worsley took to Twitter to apologize.

However within the different case, the phase involved a racist assault on a 21-year-old black musician that left him within the hospital with a number of damaged bones. The perpetrators rammed him with a automotive whereas shouting the racial epithet, which presenter Fiona Lamdin uttered uncensored. The BBC defended her use of the phrase by declaring the sufferer’s household “needed the complete info made public,” however social media however appeared extra upset by a white reporter quoting the phrase on air than by the assault itself.

This sort of laser deal with appearances (use of the n-word) over actuality (a racially motivated assault) is depressingly typical of 21st-century woke racial politics. In such a magical pondering, cracking down on racial slurs is the equal of stopping racism itself.

If an organization like Johnson & Johnson, which continues to hawk asbestos-laden talcum powder exterior North America, could be hailed as racially progressive for releasing a line of Band-Aids equivalent to darker pores and skin tones, or PepsiCo can get off the hook for flooding black communities with obesogenic excessive fructose corn syrup by merely altering the identify of its Aunt Jemima pancake syrup to one thing much less offensive, making an attempt to fireplace a soccer coach for declaring the n-word is dangerous appears completely affordable.

Soccer gamers at Texas Christian College boycotted observe on Monday after their coach, Gary Patterson, ordered participant Dylan Jordan to cease utilizing the n-word round his team-mates. It didn’t matter that Patterson was solely utilizing the phrase (in a non-public apart with Jordan) to denounce it – “that phrase is unacceptable underneath all context,” the boycotters roared after Jordan tweeted about their dialog.

I solely converse the reality…….. #BLM pic.twitter.com/7YpY6JvjgM

— Dylan Jordan (@thedylanjordan_) August three, 2020

Although he by no means denied utilizing the phrase himself, Jordan however led the witch hunt in opposition to Patterson, squealing “This conduct shouldn’t be OK now or ever” and calling for “repercussions to those actions”.  As requires his firing mounted, Patterson had no alternative however to challenge a public apology.

Such incidents could sound just like the plot of a South Park episode, however they’re actuality in two nations that when thought of themselves bastions of free expression.

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Not like different racial slurs, which fell out of favor with the arrival of the Civil Rights motion, the n-word has lingered like a nasty odor on the fringes of society and within the mainstream alike. Many blame hip-hop music and tradition, during which a variant of the phrase (“n***a” versus “n***er”) has a number of non-derogatory meanings, for its ubiquity in inner-city black communities.

As hip-hop got here to dominate the music charts, so too did its argot unfold into white and suburban communities, sometimes bumping up in opposition to precise racists who could have been stunned to be taught it was now OK to say the n-word so long as you pronounced it just a little in another way. 

Rappers like Ice Dice, who popularized the phrase’s ‘reclamation’ within the 1980s, have pushed again in opposition to accountability for glorifying both the phrase or the violent way of life their music portrays, nonetheless.

In a bitterly sarcastic music known as “Gangsta Rap Made Me Do It,” Dice argues that his lyrics, harsh as they could be, are merely a mirrored image of the disagreeable realities Individuals dwell with. “You those that we realized it from,” he tells white authorities who search to ban his music; “I heard ‘n***er’ again in 1971.”

Definitely, black individuals have the appropriate to resolve whether or not a racial slur demeaning them has anyplace in trendy society. However declaring the phrase off-limits just for all different teams opens the door to the sort of fetishization that now swirls across the n-word, the usage of which may get an individual fired based mostly solely on the colour of their pores and skin.

It additionally begs a sequence of more and more absurd questions: is an individual who’s just one/16th black “allowed” to make use of the n-word? What in the event that they’re one other dark-skinned minority, however not technically black? The arguments over whether or not white rappers or followers of hip-hop tradition are “allowed” to make use of the phrase could be downright farcical, and fully gloss over the actual points – generational poverty, separate-but-unequal race-based policing techniques, mass incarceration, the school-to-prison pipeline – that proceed to trigger immense struggling in black communities, at the same time as firms pour thousands and thousands of into the coffers of Black Lives Matter and different race-grifters.

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Adopting melanin-based double requirements solely followers the flames of racial animus. It’s turn into painfully clear that the leaders of the BLM group do not likely need a post-racial society the place all teams dwell collectively in concord – they need division alongside each “intersectional” line in existence, and are prepared to invent just a few to additional atomize the working class whereas gathering fats checks from firms frightened of operating afoul of the brand new thought police.

This goal doesn’t mirror the needs of the overwhelming majority of black activists, a rising variety of whom are talking out in opposition to BLM’s cooptation of their efforts. However those that revenue off racism will do something to make sure it continues.

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