Nigger

The NAACP apparently just buried "nigger." Well, thank god. I'm glad that issue's over and done with.

Seriously, I'm getting really sick of this issue. Of all the things that the civil rights community could get hung up on, _this_ is the one they fixate on? People's choice of fucking verbiage? This is more important than raising money for inner city schools? More important than poverty? More important than gangs? More important than scholarships? Really??

Language changes. Words gain and lose meaning. "Yankee" used to be a derogatory word for Americans used by the British. We latched onto it and owned it. Now most of New York cheers every year for the Yankees. The meaning changed. And while I'm not suggesting we create a major league baseball team called the "Niggers" (I'm thinking home field in Mobile...what do you think? Also, have fun imagining what their mascot would be...), I am suggesting that turning the term into something people affectionately call each other might not be such a bad thing. I might even go so far as to suggest that it's the best possible way to drain the power from the word.

(side note: only the BBC and Reuters seem to have had the balls to actually print the word in question instead of pussying out and printing "the N word." Politics aside, it's just bad journalism to assume that your readers know what you're talking about if you write "the N word." It's like writing "hoo ha" instead of "vagina" in an article about gynecology. Fucking grow up.)