Did He Say It or Didn’t He Say It and Does It Matter If He Said it?

Did Donald Trump say it or didn’t he say it and does it matter if he said it. The it being the “N” word, which stands for you know what, the name given to Black Americans by white Americans when they want to denigrate Black people and to flex their white supremacist muscles.

Trump said he did not say it. Omarosa Manigault Newman said he said it. Sarah Huckabee Sanders said she would not be surprised if there is a tape of him saying it. Georgia State Senator Michael Williams says it does not matter if Trump said it years before he became President. read more

To Be a Nigger or Not to Be a Nigger?

To be a Nigger or not to be a Nigger, that is the question? Whether it is nobler in mind and body to constantly suffer the racial slur hurled at Africans by white supremacist? This is the question of the day, the hour, albeit every moment that an African in America draws a breath.

Bill Maher, a rather progressive comedian thinks it is okay for him to use the slur in a matter of fact manner.

“Come on,” Maher seems to exclaim, “I can be a “House Nigger” when I want to, can’t I?”

I have never wanted to me a Nigger.I remember the first time I heard the slur. I was about five years old. A group of us were walking down a country road, on our way to pick cotton, when a school bus carrying white kids to school road by. They spat out of the window and called us “Niggers.”

In five years, I had not heard this word spoken in my house by the adults or the other children. But instantly, the word cut into the fiber of my five year old being.

It hurt.

My granny comforted me, “Sticks and stones may break my bones,” she said, “but words will never hurt me.” she affirmed.

It still hurt.

Usually, when we encountered a group of white children, they would shout Nigger, or they would sing a song: “John Brown had a little Nigger, had a little Nigger, had a little Nigger, had a little Nigg-eeer boy.”

By now I understood what the word Nigger meant, but I was clueless to know who John Brown was or what Brown’s connection to me was. It would have been subversive for my parents to mention the name John Brown in our household. In eighth grade, I learned of Brown’s raid on the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry in an attempt to end slavery.

Three years later, I read the Autobiography of Malcolm X. In it Malcolm breaks down the dichotomy of the Nigger ethos. He explained in the period of enslavement, whites distinguished between Negroes who worked in the fields and those who worked in the house with them.

One was either a “Field Nigger or a House Nigger.”

The “House Nigger,” Malcolm explained, “loved the white man more than the white man loved himself.”

About the same time my peer group of Negro boys began to debate the efficacy of using the slur Nigger as a term of endearment when said by one brother to another.

The proponents of Nigger as a term of endearment made it crystal clear they would come to the aid of any Negro brother who was slurred by a white person.

I argued that it would not be long before more liberal whites would began to use the slur as a term of endearment. What then I posited?

“Nigger, you crazy,” they laughed.

They are still laughing and progressives are slurring  the entire race on late night TV with the impunity of the white supremacist.

Wake up “Niggers,” before we are all through!

 

Harold Michael Harvey is an American novelist and essayist, the author of Paper puzzle and Justice in the Round, Editor of Easier to obtain Than to Maintain: The Globalization of Civil Rights by Charles Steele, Jr.; and the host of Beyond the Law with Harold Michael Harvey. He can be contacted at haroldmichaelharvey.com.

Obama, Larry Wilmore and That Word

Breaking news, our President Barack H. Obama, is the personal “Nigger” of a comedian less entertaining than what’s his name who outed Bill Cosby. Yet the President seems not to be offended by Wilmore’s use of this century old racial slur. Wilmore used that word in reference to the President at the conclusion of his speech before the White House Correspondent’s Dinner.

Many members of the Black community were horrified to hear those sentiments expressed in public about their beloved president. But President Obama, according to Josh Ernest, White House press secretary, “appreciated the spirit of Mr. Wilmore’s expressions.”

If this is what President Obama advised the White House press office to say, then he is expressing the age old sentiment in the hood, that “it is okay for a brother to call another brother a Nigger.”

I first heard this rationale sitting on the “smoking wall” at Lanier Senior High School back in the days before desegregation (1966), when fewer than 100 brothers and I were the only blacks students in the school. It did not make much sense to me then, nor does it now.

It always boggled my mind:

“How could the brothers get angry when one of the white boys used that derogatory term towards us before lunch, but it was okay to refer to each other by that term at lunchtime?”

Usually when the term was used during the lunch hour there was laughter all around.

I have never been able to rationalize this conundrum in my own mine, let alone attempt to explain to my white friends why it is an acceptable term coming from the brothers, but not when coming from them.

I have had professional white men insist that they meant no harm when referring to me by that term, because some black dudes they were in college with called each other that term all the time. It made it profoundly more difficult to punch that friend in mouth.

Now this news from the White House, President Obama is appreciative that he is Wilmore’s Nigger. If he is Wilmore’s Nigger, then he just proved that the Right Wingers were right, when they contended eight years ago, that “there is a Nigger in the White House.”

I hope you are feeling me Barack, my President!

SOURCES:

https://www.yahoo.com/tv/white-house-comes-larry-wilmore-192235389.html

 

Harold Michael Harvey is an American novelist and essayist, the author of Paper puzzle and Justice in the Round. He can be contacted at haroldmichaelharvey.com

 

Obama Said “Nigger”

ATLANTA, GA (CASCADE PRESS) President Barack Obama said “Nigger” the other day.

I just be damn.

Like everything he eats, drinks, wears, thinks and does, it is causing quite a controversy.

What’s new about that?

I just be damned.

It is not like the President called anybody a “Nigger.” It is not that he denigrated anyone with the use of the word “Nigger.” He did not use the term to prove he was superior to a so-called “Nigger.” He did not say “Nigger” in such a way that you knew with a degree of specificity that Obama hated “Niggers.”

I just be damned.

Obama said that we have to realize that racism is more than calling someone “Nigger.”

You know what?

Obama is right. He should know.

I am sure growing up with white people he, like every black American I know in his age range, was called a “Nigger” multiple times by people wanting to impress their superior status over him. For a guy with half white DNA, that really has to sting.

When I was in junior high school, I had a white teacher who called me “Nigger” everyday. I knew with a certainty that she was belittling me and my parentage. Although she has long since rotted in her grave, I rather still dislike her today for the  sting that word produced in my soul each day she pronounced to the world that I was a “Nigger. ”

Then there were the times when my black classmates and I walked from football practice through a white neighborhood and encountered a group of white men, probably in their mid-twenties, drinking beer under a tree.

As my group passed them, someone often yell out, “Nigger.”  Looking over our shoulders we could see the group with their menacing stare daring us to turn and fight. Fighting would be futile. If we managed to beat them out of their drunken racist minds, they would lie and say we were trying to break into a home in the area.

I know the sting of the word “Nigger.” The manner in which President Obama said “Nigger” the other day does not carry the same sting, nor did he intend it too. This is the crux of the matter. Racism, Obama properly opined, is more than a word.

While we are on the subject of words with sharp meanings, I like soup. I like to have saltine crackers with my soup. Then one day my doctor took me off crackers. I now hate crackers. I won’t touch a cracker and I won’t go near a cracker. The only thing a cracker can do for me is point me in the direction of some sweet potato chips.

I just be damned, I just said crackers. I just said I hate crackers.

I just be damned.

Oh my gosh, there is that word again, damn. Damn becomes profane when you say “damn you,” or worst when one damns God. Otherwise it is just a word that denotes a doomed state.

Political correctness, I just be damned.

 

Harold Michael Harvey, is the author of the legal thriller “Paper Puzzle,” and “Justice in the Round: Essays on the American Jury System,” available at Amazon and at haroldmichaelharvey.com. He can be contacted at hmharvey@haroldmichaelharvey.com