Posted on 12/14/2005 9:51:29 AM PST by inquest
[snip]
Amazingly, Pryor matured on this issue, making me sing hallelujah. In 1979, he flew to Kenya. It was a trip recommended to him by his psychiatrist after his wife Jennifer hauled him out of a house full of hookers and drugs. After touring Kenya's national museum, Pryor sat in a hotel lobby full of what he described as ''gorgeous black people, like everyplace else we'd been. The only people you saw were black. At the hotel, on television, in stores, on the street, in the newspapers, at restaurants, running the government, on advertisements. Everywhere."
That caused Pryor to say: ''Jennifer. You know what? There are no niggers here. . . . There are no niggers here. The people here, they still have their self-respect, their pride."
In ''Pryor Convictions," Pryor said that he left Africa ''regretting ever having uttered the word 'nigger' on a stage or off it. It was a wretched word. Its connotations weren't funny, even when people laughed. To this day I wish I'd never said the word. I felt its lameness. It was misunderstood by people. They didn't get what I was talking about. Neither did I. . . . So I vowed never to say it again."
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
Once a year DJ has a column about how the NCAA uses black atheletes until their eligibility is over then flunks them out.
That word to me has never been about black people having their own slang or separate culture; it is an epithet along the lines of calling someone "black trash." I wouldn't want to be called "white trash," which is a common epithet in the South. There is nothing cultural or funny about it.
One might even argue that "white trash" is racist toward blacks, because it implies that blacks are expected to be trash, while whites who are trash are the notable exception.
Trash is trash and nobody is immune regardless of color, shape or national idiocy.
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