By Bill Starlin

What makes somebody a nigger? Is it skin color? That would mean that there are hundreds of millions of niggers worldwide.  Pretty scary thought. Does economic condition make you a nigger? That would make for billions of niggers worldwide. That would be incredibly frightening. Why? Because the source of all fear is ignorance and the unknown…and so far…no one is willing to say what a nigger really is. Chris Rock described an ongoing war between Black people and niggers, but that implies that they aren’t synonymous. That would imply nigger is perhaps a social/mental construct.  Perhaps a nigger is what a nigger projects.

When Nas dropped his Untitled album last year, it’s original title was Nigger.  It wouldn’t be the first time that a piece of media bore that name, as Dick Gregory’s autobiography carried the same immense legacy. It brought a firestorm of attention and both real and contrived outrage. On one hand it’s just a word, and not an uncommon one. On the other, the feelings it conjures are rooted in a history of racism, death, exploitation and hypocrisy.  In a world where words live far longer than we do and carry far more pain than sticks and stones (since people deal with each other over texts and email) we should at least examine our slings and arrows.

Last night, MTV hosted its annual Video Music Awards in New York.  Of related interest was an incident involving Kanye West, whose petulance has become annual happenstance at these events along with the accompanying moment of clarity and subsequent apology. His antics are often written off as ‘Ye being ‘Ye and people move on with their lives. Last night however was different.  Taylor Swift, a country music star, happened to win Best Female Video over a field of nominees which included Beyonce. This particular tantrum had nothing to do with him in contention but he snatched the microphone from Swift in order to champion the Bootyliscious One. The real effect of this incident didn’t occur on the stage but rather on the internet.  Here’s a taste of what went down in response:

I don’t believe that similar outbursts by Mr. West have elicited such a vehement response from the masses. In addition, there aren’t many responses in the above video that speak to being tired of his antics or even having a real taste for him at all, but the amount of nigger-calling is alarming, not only in the amount, but  the brazenness of execution.  None of the above twitter accounts were private; many had the posters’ actual real names, and most even had their pictures clearly identifying them. Normally such boorish behavior could be attributed to the anonymity of the internet but clearly none of these people actually seemed to care whether people would attribute these comments to them or not.

Kanye West is many things to many people.  Some consider him a great performer/artist.  Others consider him a pompous ass. However you feel about Kanye, and I’m sure the truth isn’t mutually exclusive to the above two options, none of what he did on that stage last night warrants him being called a nigger. Spoiled, certainly. Arrogant, petulant, and indicative of arrested development, definitely.  But having a public outburst of that nature qualifying him for niggerhood is flat out disturbing, especially in light of recent events.

A week ago, in the midst of America’s political economically driven turmoil, the president of the United States spoke before Congress to give his side regarding impending health care reform/legistation. In the middle of his speech, South Carolina Representative Joe Wilson yelled out “You Lie!” At an event of far greater magnitude with far greater importance to the lives of all Americans, an elected official, who is making decisions that affect future generations, cat-called the President of the United States. It was later discovered that not only does he have a history of similar outbursts, but that he is also heavily funded by health care interests and probably had an ulterior motive.  He was also probably incorrect. According to the above path of logic, that was some true nigger s**t, yet aside from calls for an apology, or people attempting to prove or disprove his outburst, there was nothing approaching the level of trash behavior to the order of the above vid.

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Obama’s election supposedly brought the advent of a post-racial America.  The only ones that truly believed that or had the ignorance to express that have obviously never been under the thumb. Regardless of whether it is true or not however, the race issue is not something that can be ever swept away, no matter how many colors of Presidential ice cream we sample. And on a societal scale I suppose that is something to be expected.

 Machines don’t solely stop working because of catastrophes.  Usually it’s a gear here, a belt there, and tiny incidents that manifest themselves beneath the hood.  The nigger machine is full of gears like the remnants of slaves, Sean Bell, Oscar Grant, Patrick Dourismond, Amadou Diallo, and countless others who pay for that status with their lives. These people have been niggered out of existence by force, by society, by laws and those who enforce them. There’s no room on the nigger wagon for Kanye West. We can save the outbursts for the next awards show, or the Romper room where they belong. Maybe if Messrs. West and Wilson played together in that room, we’d go a bit further towards understanding what a nigger really is.

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Bill Starlin can be reached via E-mail @ Billstarlin@yahoo.com

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