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Originally Posted by To Be Quite Honest
I wasn't the one who changed the historical context.
I get your position. There is deep history behind the word and it's hard to leave it in the past.
There is a Professor that teaches an entire course on the term.
Neal A. Lester, dean of humanities and former chair of the English department at Arizona State University
In my courses, I’m more interested in raising questions than in finding answers to them. I think the questions lead to potential self-discovery. It’s not about whether or not a person uses the n-word. I try to move the class beyond easy binaries—“Well, blacks can use it, but whites can’t.” That line of thinking doesn’t take us very far at all. What we are trying to do, at least the way I have conceptualized and practiced this discovery, is so much more. The class strives to teach us all manner of ways to talk about, think about and to understand ourselves, and each other, and why and how we fit in the rest of the world.
It's more about moving past the race card then anything and we have a long way to go. |
read about schemas, lexicons and the collective consciousness and you will understand how horrible your opinion is. Simply saying the word keeps it in the english lexicon thereby perpetuating racism, even if inadvertently. Using the word keeps it in the public awareness and forces it to pertain it's original meaning and impact. It's like calling someone a porch monkay, it's not the exact same as the original word but it keeps the meaning in the collective knowledge base of the public.
So you are in fact perpetuating racism inadvertently and denying it. Intent does not equal result. The less people there are like you saying it the less the children in the next generation will ever hear it let alone know what it means and the less the racial division is continued, but hey, if it makes you feel cool. There is no argument you can make that can counter the fact that you are personally responsible for a small portion of the racial division in our society. If society were to allow the word to fade into obscurity then it obviously wouldn't be a problem anymore, there are innumerable racial slurs from past generations that are completely ambiguous due to them no longer being in the public lexicon.