What if one day a movement happened where white people proclaimed, “No one but white people can say the word hick?” And if you said it and you were not white, it would be offensive and could make you liable to be beat down.
Sounds pretty silly, right?
This is an extremely goofy example of a much larger and more deeply rooted issue in America.
The N-word is still being used in multiple forms, but is only acceptable for one designated group of people to use.
I’ve had a problem with the constant use of this word since I was a kid. I never quite understood why a group of proud people would continue to call themselves a word that was meant to degrade them so many years ago.
If a word can’t be used by everyone, it shouldn’t be used at all.
I bring this up because Alec Baldwin came under fire for tweeting, “I love that song N—– IN PARIS!!! I love Kanye!!” He continued saying, “Kanye and I are doing a song called N—– IN MONTAUK. My album is called MY BEAUTIFUL PALE TWISTED FANTASY.”
Dude likes the song a lot. How is that a problem?
As a half-black individual myself, I never batted an eye when I saw the tweets. My irritation came from the backlash Baldwin got from angry Twitter users calling him racist and wondering why he thought he was allowed to say that word. He responded with, “Anyone who thinks that quoting the title of that song is racist is a disgrace. To the human race.”
I agree with him.
Where in his tweets was he using the word to offend black people? The N-word is ingrained in rap culture now, and because rap is a part of the mainstream, people from many different cultures, backgrounds and races listen to rap music.
It’s completely ridiculous to call someone a racist for singing along to a song they like. If there’s something wrong with someone quoting a song with the N-word in it, then there’s something wrong with the word itself. I wish it would be eradicated from our vocabulary all together.
This issue is becoming increasingly more problematic with the onslaught of white rappers like Asher Roth, Mac Miller, Kreayshawn and Iggy Azalea. Kreayshawn was called out by The Game and Rick Ross for using the N-word on her mixtape.
Like I said before, the word is now a part of hip-hop culture. It’s incredibly hypocritical to call someone racist because they use a word they heard constantly when growing up.
Using the word and bashing others outside of the group for using it only divides us further and further apart.
Maybe I sound too idealistic by wishing that we could stop dividing ourselves by race, but the blending of races and cultures is happening more frequently, day by day. I have a black dad, a Puerto Rican mom and a Jewish boyfriend.
I’ve spent my whole life trying to move past the boundaries racial standards have put on me. I can’t be the only one who wants this hypocrisy to end.
