If you trust the media you are headed down a blind alley. If they could just give us the facts and leave their opinion at home, we might start a level of trust.
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Bravo, Mr. Arceneau! You can call someone a dandelion and make it a slur or a term of affection depending on the context. And you can never utter the word fag or nigger in your life and it doesn’t mean you aren’t a homophobe or a racist.
I can’t decide if it is faux outrage by the conservatives or if it is some sincere quality akin to their lack of sense of humor and inability to detect satire that keeps them from grokking nuance and context. But since it all comes down to treating people like fellow human beings and applying the Golden Rule and conservatives aren’t too good at that, I’m leaning towards faux outrage.
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I think I speak for many black people when I say that I’m wonderfully bored with white people’s obsession with policing whether or not it’s ever appropriate for a black person to use “nigger” and all its variances.
Yes indeed.
But!!!
President Obama gave republicans and FoxNewsoids the perfect segue away from discussing the fact that Roof and all these racist fucks are hardcore CONSERVATIVES!!! What did Bill Mahar say? Not every republican is a racist, but every racist is a republican? This was a perfect opportunity to lay that bare. That is why Fox spent so much time trying to spin this as religious persecution. Now they get to trot out the angry black man meme. The double standard meme. And every old white viewer gets to spend a couple days saying the n-word openly and freely because its in the news. And not once, while this wound is raw, do we get to make the case that Roof and the people who influence him are Republican supporters.
I hope we get back to that point and soon.
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Can I at least type “ni**er”? …What the hell? I swear I hit the “g” key.
Let me try again: ni##er. Damn. ni66er. ni&&er.
I give up. I must be too white.
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White victimhood on display. 
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I can’t wait until America is majority minority, so I can claim race-exclusive use of all the demeaning terms thrown at whitened persons.
I’ll stroll proudly into a restaurant, wait a whole 5 seconds, and call out “can a ___________ get some service here?” That’s my plan. I’m having a little trouble filling in the blank, though. “Pasty person” is my best one so far, but I am hoping to do better.
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Yeah Booh fucking Hooh
Me neither. I hope I live long enough to see it.
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You would think I would be jaded to this, but they do seem to find another level of contemptible malfeasance and jackassery in which too sink.
And I wish I could give “likes” to the author of this article. It’s a well stated piece that in a sane world would not even need to be stated at all.
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Obama did not “use” the word. He “mentioned” it. This distinction is basic to the analysis of language. Why are we condemned to wallow in the discourse of know-nothings?
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As long as racism is sanitized in our office discussions it will flourish. The President has made several observations regarding issue of race in our society, but the media has completely ignored them, choosing instead to brand blacks as thugs and whites as simply mentally disturbed. Well, they can’t keep pretending the problem isn’t real. If what it takes is the President saying nigger then I hope he says it again and again, until white privilege is finally openly discussed and equality for all races is actually our goal.
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I just watched Harold Ford on Alex Wagner saying he didn’t like the president using that word, does he understand the context in which the president used it?I have never thought of Ford as a liberal, he’s a strange guy who tends to side with republicans on to many issues, plus where does this white guy come off telling the president he’s shouldn’t have used that word?
Let me be perfectly clear: I find the word “nigger” completely appalling, and a part of me will always cringe whenever I hear it or see it in type - yes, even within my own sentence. It is a word so vile and a reflection of such a shameful part of our society (notice I did not say our past, since racism is still alive and well), that I understand why it is so taboo that major media outlets either mask the word or use the phrase “the N word,” just as TPM has done in the title of this article.
…and yet: a part of me wonders if it does more damage to tiptoe around this word in mature, sociopolitical dialogue.
Now, I can’t stress this enough: I am not condoning that “nigger” ever be used as a slur or insult. Moreover, I don’t condone white kids who think they’re hot shit calling each other “nigga.” Those uses of the word have no respectable place in our society, and can’t disappear fast enough.
But in stories like this, where media outlets are simply relaying a quote - from our president, no less, who is using it to discuss very real and very present problems in this country - I do not understand why they cannot quote it verbatim. To treat this word with such trepidation, does this some now not subconsciously feed into the age-old prejudice of the “scary, angry black man” trope? (Thanks, by the way, for feeding the American public that load of bs, Birth of a Nation…)
I try to take some personal responsibility in expressing this opinion, in that I make a conscious choice to actually say the word “nigger” if I am having a discourse with someone on political events. Or, in one instance, I had to confront a client at my job that used the word “nigga” casually, insisting to her that it was a violation of our agency’s non-discrimination policy; when I relayed this story to a coworker, I quoted the client verbatim. It is uncomfortable me to do so, but I also feel that it is somehow a more mature approach. And if someone were to overhear me (i.e. hear my use of the word, but not the context), and confront me, I would not be afraid to explain myself and the context, and I would hope that this would lead to further serious discourse.
Does anyone else feel this way?
On a slightly lighter note, I’m letting Louis CK drive the point home with a little twisted levity (from the beginning up through 0:45): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dF1NUposXVQ
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Philosophers commonly recognize something called the “use-mention distinction” – the difference between using a word and merely mentioning a word. There is a world of difference between the two. Obama was mentioning the word “nigger” not using it by derogatorily attacking anyone with a racial epithet.
As Quine said:
“Boston” contains six letters and no quotation marks, and Boston contains some 800,000 people.”
The first use of “Boston” above is a mention, the second is a use.
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Yes, very much so. I cringe almost as much at the term “n-word” as I do at what it’s replacing, it seems so childish. We have a lot of growing up to do, both individually and as a society.
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I like pinky. “Can a pinky get a tuna fish sandwich up in this gosh-darn establishment?” LOL!
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I like that one. It delivers the message I want to deliver, which is “The gloves are coming off, lads!”
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Great article or op-ed. Couldn’t agree more. Context is everything.
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Romney has returned in order to save his party from itself as it ignores racism
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If Republicans can use it when they speak about the president, he can use it when speaking about how blacks are treated. It’s better than everyone ignoring what’s been going on.
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