Whites know EXACTLY how they used the word in the past… and I am really interested in hearing WHY IT IS that they keep bringing up ‘why can’t WE use it?”

Hmmmmph.

Why would they WANT to?

Let’s for a moment just forget about the discussion about why blacks are using it…I want them to answer the question of WHY they want to use it!!

Hmmmmph.

Lisa

And why is the word and concept of justice being cheapened this way? This is the same Hasselback that was puking out Fox News talking points during the Jeremiah Wright scandal. There is no way to confuse her with someone genuinely concerned about JUSTICE.

If Black folks never used the word again from this day forth, nothing about Hasselback gives me the impression that she would say a word about on-going and inherited racial inequality, let alone Reparations.

That’s that JUSTICE is about. And as far as balancing… When all other groups including Whites stop using racial/ethnic slurs/jokes about their own group within their own group then and only then will White people even begin to have any standing on the issue.

But, you know, I missed the movement or uproar over Jeff Foxworthy’s “You might be a redneck.” I’ve also been privy, all my life, to White-on-White use of racial slurs as endearing, amongst themselves, and even used in hurtful ways but I’ve never seen an ounce of concern for “justice” or for eliminating the double-standard of quietly accepting the phenomenon among everybody else except African-Americans.

I also think Elisabeth’s performance here, though probably not staged, is a perfect instance of white center-stage sickness. When it comes to racial discussions, our tendency is to jump in and dominate the discusssion, all while talking, paradoxically, about OTHER people in terms of race, instead of about ourselves in terms of race–about what being “white” actually means for us, about what being trained as white has done TO us.

That latter proposed move wouldn’t be so appropriate on Elisabeth’s part in this particular discussion, since the topic IS the n-word, but dominating the discussion in the way she does is such a common white form of behavior in these kinds of mixed race discussions. The basic message, again a terribly presumptuous one, is “I need to tell you how you should live your life. And if you try to complain or explain what race means in your life, I’m going to tell you how you’re wrong about that too, because somehow, I just know more about what it is to be you than you yourself do.”

How sad that the other women there (Whoopi excluded) let that discussion, on THAT WORD no less, be all about poor widdle white Elisabeth.