[QUOTE=Dumbguy]
You’re right John, this is racism. A black man in America can call another black man a nigger and get away with it. Jay-Z and Kanye West can even sell a couple million albums doing it. You and I, as white men, are discriminated against in this instance, and perhaps this is wrong.
[/QUOTE]
I do not see that there is any true discrimination, (using your phrase as a starting point for my comments and not challenging you, particularly).
I would agree with John Mace that the rules should be “the same” for everyone, but I think many folks are looking at the rules in the wrong way. The rules are based in “in group” and “out group,” not on race. Race is an inadvertant set of baggage based in American history that confuses the issue.
It is not true that if it is OK for a black person to use the word “nigger,” then it is OK for a white person to use the word “nigger.” However, it is also true that it is not automatic racism for a white to use the word “nigger.”
Let’s step away from race for a moment. In the 1960s in Detroit, the ethnic groups in the white community that were the butts of the most jokes were the descendants of Italian and Polish immigrants. I had lots of classmates whose parents or grandparents were immigrants from Italy or Poland. The derogatory “Wop” and “Polack” were the most frequent ethnic slurs for those people. Now, you could get a fight going pretty easily by calling someone “Wop” or “Polack,” whereas calling me (or anyone sharing my ethnic background) “Kraut” or “Mick” would get no more than a shrug and a “Yeah, I am, so what?” response.
So, there are some ethnic terms that can rile up people because they have current meaning as slurs while other ethnic terms carry no such baggage.*
Within those communities, a number of people used the terms as friendly insults, employing the logic and practice of drawing the sting from a weapon by employing it as a joke. Occasionally they were employed ironically. At other times they were used as actual insults in the sense that You are so bad/dumb/messed up that you actually provide evidence for those outsiders who regard us in this hateful way. Others within those communities always regarded such terms as insults, regardless who used them or why, and treated the words as taboo, prohibited from any use.
Given that, it was still true that I could get away with calling Stan or Luigi “Polack” or “Wop” as long as they knew and I knew that it was intended as friendly banter. (They had no ethnic slur to use against me, so they were liable to resort to questioning my intelligence or parentage or sexual identity, but within the realm of friendly banter, I had an insult that I could employ without serious offense.)
Thus, we do need to consider context as a mitigating factor. I might call Stan a dumb Polack, but I had better not call him that in front of his Dad (unless I had also established a similar level of friendship and respect with his father). I would certainly have been excoriated had I referred to Polacks or Wops if I was making a speech or being interviewed. Such general slurs would have been considered grossly rude behavior in any context outside the friendly banter of established friendships. Similarly, if I used such a slur to a friend (acceptably to them) in a locale where it would have been overheard by some person outside our cohort, I would have been perceived to have been rude. When a new person entered our class, I often saw situations where the use of such slurs, long accepted by the principals, was hostilely challenged by a newcomer.
Bringing it back to “race” and “nigger,” we see the same rules. Some significant number of persons (of all ethnic backgrounds) look at the history of the word “nigger” and consider it outside the pale on every occasion. Some others, mostly within the population of blacks, but occasionally including a non-black who has established a friendship with some number of blacks, employ it as a way to display the comfort level of their friendship (we are such close friends that I can even call you a terrible name without giving offense). On the other hand, no one outside the group–or who has not been admitted to some small, friendly subset of the group) can employ thwe word without giving offense.
Diogenese is wrong when he insists that no white person may ever use “nigger” without being racist, but all the calls for "equality’ or “the same rules” are really pretty dumb unless one has actually established a relationship with a particular set of individuals who accept one’s use of the term. (And, if there does not happen to be a reciprocal slur that people can employ against the speaker, that just demonstrates that there is not perfect reciprocity in the world.)
- It is quite possible that “Mick” or “Kraut” might have been an insult in another locale–meanings do have geographic boundaries–but they bore no such stigma in 1960s Detroit.
)