Flippin’ the Word

For politicos as for pop stars, “the N-word” is the stuff of dreams, the gravity of which they mold out of our collective yearning to be offended together with our related collective need to be politically correct.

In a discussion stemming from Jesse Jackson’s comments about Barack Obama’s “nuts,” The View hosts - led by the rabid race-baiter Whoopi Goldberg - ganged up on Elizabeth Hasselbeck over their disagreement about the use of “the N-word.”

You probably think you know where I’m going with this: Given Hasselbeck’s conservative views, you’re likely assuming that she defended the use of the word, or that she, being all beige like she is, made racially insensitive statements.

Wrong.

What provoked Whoop’s ire is that Hasselbeck deigned to suggest that nobody should use the word, undoubtedly referring to black hipsters who think they’re all avant-garde for peppering their songs, their movies, their dialogue with that word. That same word, mind you, which, when uttered by the melanin-impaired among us, supposedly celebrates the white patriarchy.

Whoopi, along with fellow black co-host Sherri Shepherd, got positively head-bobbing when Hasselbeck declared that even blacks shouldn’t use “the N-word.” Whoop’s argument is - get this! - that blacks can use it because “we took out it out of the hands of the people who were using it and put it into our hands…”

Ok, so whites used the word to denigrate blacks, then blacks, empowered by the civil rights movement, claimed it as their very own so that they could…denigrate themselves?

Since there’s pretty much nowhere to go from there, I’ll just let you chew on that for a bit.

All I know is that it must be nice to be play the linguistic referee to a language which you can hardly speak.