Two years ago, David Cole noted that saying "nigger" is now an act of justifiable defiance.
Lamar specifically chose a white girl to come up on stage to perform with him. And he specifically chose “m.A.A.d. City” as the number to be performed. So, as requested, she began to recite the lyrics. And when she said “nigga,” Lamar stopped the show and publicly humiliated her, encouraging the audience to boo and insult her as he scolded her for doing exactly what he’d asked her to do. By the next day, the girl had been threatened and harassed off social media. That the woman in question is rotund and unattractive only made it worse, as she proved perfect grist for the meme mill.
Race aside, let’s focus on the unequal power dynamics at play here. A multimillionaire rapper humiliated, scolded, and whipped up a hate mob against an absolute nobody who wielded zero power in the situation. Remember the days when leftists claimed to side with the powerless and disenfranchised, regardless of race? But today’s media elites not only sided with Lamar, they actually applauded him for bullying the girl. Mind you, these same elites will no doubt extol the virtues of Spike Lee’s upcoming film BlaKkKlansman, which is filled with white actors saying “nigger.” Because those actors are just “playing a part.” But isn’t singing a song roughly the same thing? Does one actually have to be an American-born Vietnam vet to sing “Born in the U.S.A.”? I’ve karaoke’d to “Bohemian Rhapsody” more times than I can recall, but you know what? I’ve never actually killed a man in real life. What’s the difference between a white chick saying “nigga” while reading song lyrics at the request of the author, and a white guy in a Spike Lee film doing the same while reading from the script? In both instances, the whites are reciting the words of a black man at the request of the black man.
And if was true two years ago, it's easily 8x more true now†, so it's even more important. You may note that, perhaps remembering reading this column when it first came out, I have been more aggressive both on this blog and in real life with saying "nigger". Because they tell us we aren't allowed to. And they don't get to decide that.
Nigger.
Nigger.
Nigger.
Nigger.
Nigger.
Doesn't that make you feel better?
† In the #NiggerLivesMoreImportantThanSocietyMotherFucker era, I think we can mathematically express the new importance of speaking up by using the formula ex, where "x" is the number of years since an article talking about how important it is to speak up against censorship by saying something: since May 29 was 2 years and 1 month ago (2.0833 years), then e2.0833 = 8.03119499. That sounds about right.
Meanwhile, on L'Affaire Lamar Jeremy Helligar writes in Variety:
Even today, for many of us, when a white person utters the N-word, it’s like the sound of a whip slapping the back of a slave. Because of its loaded history, it will never be OK for white people to use the N-word (not even if it’s Eminem, though he inexplicably seems to get a pass from the hip hop community), no matter what the circumstance.Well shit, if the mere word nigger to you is like a whip slapping the back a slave then let's just re-introduce both whips and slavery until you can figure out the difference, Jeremy.
