Viva the dreaded n-word!

As far as publicity stunts go, the NAACP's recent mock funeral for the dreaded n-word wasn't very effective, in the sense that I hadn't even heard of it until someone mentioned it to me the other day. And it's not like I don't spend a pretty good amount of time trolling the Internets for stories with a racial element.

Specifically, my boy jimbrah izrael sent me a link to this NPR segment he did on it the other day. He wanted me to post it on my site in order to help generate interest in the program, which I'll probably be appearing on one of these days. I would've been on it this week, but I was busy sleeping and taking care of some shit.

So yeah, go ahead and check that out:

NPR: Barbershop: What's the Buzz?

Ironically, said mock funeral was part of a larger conference in which whatever black leaders are involved with the NAACP these days bitched and moaned about the fact that they can't get more young people to join them. Hmm... Could it be because all the NAACP does these days is pull stupid shit like this? I'm just saying.

To tell you the truth, I'm not really sure what the NAACP does these days. It could very well be the case that they're out there in the field doing the kind of important work that will finally bring black people to the promised land (wherever that is), though I doubt it. If I had to guess, I'd say they're in the business of extracting blood money from corporations, not unlike Jesse Jackson, who I believe is considered his own separate entity. TPAR, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

I think the last time I heard about them on TV it was because President Sieg Howdy wasn't going to bother speaking at one of their conventions, though now that I think of it that could have been the Congressional Black Caucus. Whatever. I guess what it came down to is that he figured the few black people who do vote Republican could give a rat's ass whether he has his picture taken with whoever's considered the poverty pimp du jour in the black community anyway, so fuck it!

Which brings up an interesting point: If hardly anyone follows the NAACP these days other than the few dumb fucks still involved with it, and if they can hardly get on TV with the most ridonkulous of publicity stunts, and if the President doesn't even feel obliged to acknowledge their existence, then what makes them the leaders of the black community any more than, say, yours truly, other than the fact that they helped get black people the right to vote 40 or 50 years ago? As Janet Jackson would say, let's wait a while what have you done for me lately?

As far as this business with doing away with the dreaded n-word is concerned, of course I'm not buying it. Not that you could get rid of a word even if you wanted to, but my thought with regard to the n-word is this: if you wanna use it, then go ahead and use; if you don't, then don't. Personally, I've been known to curse from time to time, but I hardly ever use the n-word either online or in the quote-unquote real world. Not because I'm concerned with hurting people's feelings, but I just feel there's better (and more amusing) ways of doing it than calling someone a nigger.

And isn't that what this is really about anyway? As I've pointed out before on this site, what people say about you tends to hurt that much more when you lack self-esteem. In this case, the real reason a slur such as the dreaded n-word remains hurtful to the black community to this day is because so many black people really are shiftless, ignorant fucks. If anything, the dreaded n-word might be useful as a vaguely hurtful reminder that so many of us have yet to get our shit together. If we did, my guess is that it wouldn't matter as much what people called us. We'd be too busy out spending money.