The Silly Season, Part 3
August is the silly season in the news business. The consequential stories can’t get reported, and the silly stories get magnified, just because so many of the employees are on vacation.
My guess is that if Dr. Laura Schlesinger had gone on her 5 minute N***** rant a month earlier, no one would have noticed.
Actually, Schlesinger was making two points. The first is that N***** is just a word, and that banning it gives it more power. This was the point that George Carlin and Lenny Bruce made with curse words and it still holds true.
Her second point was that she was being discriminated against because she couldn’t use N***** on her radio show and African-American entertainers can use it on cable channels. This point is almost paranoid. There seems to be an effort on most conservatives’ part to portray themselves as victims and this effort doesn’t help the public discussion at all.
As a kid growing up, I learned that there were words that were considered an insult if I used them at all. I learned not to use the words “Wop”, “Spic”, or “Polack” if I wanted to maintain friendly relations with my classmates.
Even today in my neighborhood, the word “Portagee” will bring a white person grief. People of Portuguese descent, of course, use it all the time.
I think usage is important. N***** shouldn’t be used as an insult, but it shouldn’t be censored when used in other contexts. Schlesinger insulted no individuals during her rant.
But her advice to the caller, that she shouldn’t have married her husband if she was so “oversensitive” was cruel, insensitive and inexcusable.
The goal is to integrate African-American people fully into American social, political and economic life, and this obsession with a word is a harmful digression.
