a nigger is a nigger.. no matter what color they happen to be. One race just happend to get the short end of the stick in particular when it comes to that word.. but then that word is a double standard since it's used in that race constantly as a greeting and a badge.
Imus really didn't do anything bad.. he took the PR hit and he's coming back with a new show. I've heard far worse radio personalities use far worse than anything dog or Imus said.. it's called shock jocky. Now I'm not condoning using nigger as a racial slur, but if a person wants to use it as slur then that's his/her right.
For instance, one could say that 'gun owners are the new niggers of society' and the word doesn't constitute a racial slur although many might feel it does. It holds a viable truth. So basically there is no word in the language that should ever be considered obsolete. They all have a use .. it just depends on the people who use them and in what context they use them in.
Most people hear the song title "Rock and Roll Nigger" and automatically assume it's a racial song.. well,, let's hear what Patti Smith (author) has to say about it:
Quote:
Still, Smith remained torn between her allegiance to the heroic figures of the male rebel tradition and her desire to unleash a female wildness that obliterates figuration altogether. Nowhere is this more apparent than on 'Rock 'n' Roll Nigger' (Easter). The nigger here is a woman (the title obviously inspired by Yoko Ono's 'Woman is the Nigger of the World'). 'Rock 'n' Roll Nigger' is Smith announcing that female rebellion is the new frontier. In some latent fashion, the song is saying: if hipsters have always wanted to be White Negroes, and woman is the nigger of the world, then why can't female rebellion be the model for all future rebels?
But in a rambling rant halfway through the song, Smith namechecks male innovators (Hendrix, Jesus, Jackson Pollock) as 'niggers,' as though she's casted around for female archetypes of rebellion and come up empty-handed. The sleevenotes declare that 'any man who extends beyond the classic form is a nigger.' This resembles the arguments of theorists like Hélène Cixous, who claim that male avant-gardists like Joyce and Mallarmé were somehow engaged in écriture féminine; they were able to rupture the strictures of patriarchal thought and syntax because they had special access to the 'dark continent' of femininity. Certainly, these poètes maudit and their rock 'n' roll descendants (Morrison, Iggy, Tom Verlaine) were Smith's models. Apart from the black sheep that is 'Rock 'n' Roll Nigger''s original focus (Smith herself), Woman appears in this song only in the form of the 'the infinite sea.'
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article:
http://www.oceanstar.com/patti/crit/sexrevol.htm
so basically, nigger in and of itself isn't a bad word. It's just that it has been frowned upon because one race has adopted the word in one sense or another and uses it negatively even to themselves.. and that in history it was used in a derogatory way.
For me the word has always meant slow, dumb, lazy and worthless.. so for me that word can apply to any dumb skin tone.
Anyway, this thread is about Dog using it. I'm sure he uses it quite often and will continue to use it to label a sector of race, but I can promise you once the PR blows by.. or even before that.. his stupid show will be back on the air somewhere. Ratings and money are just too powerful in the media machine.