Disclaimer: If you are offended by the usage of the word Nigga, Niggas, Nigger or any variation of the word……………….. get over it!
So Gwyneth Paltrow Tweets out, “Niggas in Paris for real”, and the Black blogosphere goes up in arms, white blogs discussed it also, but Black bloggers seem to want to keep it on the front page for propaganda purposes. After seeing it x amount of times since the incident I decide to add my hundred billion cent opinion to it, yeah I said it, 100 billion cent opinion.
My first thought was niggas please, my second thought was niggas please and my third thought was, I just used the word nigga in written format more times than in one sentence than I have since I thought I was destined to be an MC. Casual T was the name, people call me Tab so I was Casual Tab, get it, then T Slang, Tab Slang. Don’t laugh T-Pain getting money, I wish I would have thought about auto-tuning myself back then, but oh well!
As I grew older and wiser, I decided to limit my usage of the word and my MC names transformed into Reign Philosophe, yeah that’s right with an E and Wizdom Manifest, with a Z. What kind of Hip Hop titan would I have been without corrupting the English language just a little bit right? Sadly my career as the world’s greatest MC never took flight, probably because I only recorded 1 song and never went back to get it mastered, but I was cold I tell you, cold!
But anyway, back to Nigga, that infamous, diabolical 5 letter word that has caused this “uproar”. To the niggas that keep posting about how offensive it is, Niggas Please.
Historically ……………… blah, blah, blah, yada, yada, yada. Now that you are caught up on the historical meaning and significance of the word, let’s move on shall we.
For the past 30+ years of the existence of Hip Hop, the word Nigga has been used. We, Black men, hoisted the word into the stratosphere and said that we were going to change the meaning of it. We urbanized the spelling by subtracting the E & R and added an A to take it from nigger; a term of hatred spewed by whites, to Nigga a term of endearment when spoken amongst brothers. Hip Hop, which was quickly becoming the culture and language of the worlds disenfranchised youth translated this new meaning and spelling to people from New York, to England, to Japan, Africa, China, South America, Russia, Germany, and to every crevice of this planet that had the capacity to receive radio waves. At this point the word started to take on different meanings associated with the way it was spelled and with how a non-black person used it.
There are now kids, Black, White, Mexican, Asian, etc, that have lived their entire lives hearing that there are 2 ways to use the word. Nigger if you’re trying to demean a person and Nigga if you are referring to a friend.
So really, what did we, Black people, expect?
C’mon, Hip Hop is the largest cultural movement the world has ever experienced, period. Plus it is completely voluntary. You don’t have to force Hip Hop on people, it’s readily accepted by those who understand the struggle, and believe me, most of the world understands the struggle. Did we think that we were going to be able to claim that the word was transcending its old meaning and subsequently think that it wouldn’t catch on with other races over time? If that was the thought then as we, Black people seem to do often, miscalculated by the square root of Pi squared x 1000 to the 13th power, suck on that Stephen Hawking.
Back to the subject at hand, Gwyneth Paltrow used the title of a song in a Tweet. I know that the 100’s of white Parisians at the concert that night song right along with Kanye, yeah Kanye first, Chicago stand up, and Jay Z’s song Niggas In Paris, and bellowed out those exact words in unison with the MC’s.
If you’re still offended by White people and other people using the word around you, don’t go to any concerts in the near future, and please refrain from watching any White, Asian, and Hispanic men and women fight each other on any video posted online.
Oh, and my personal opinion on this matter is, if you haven’t caught on by now, is:
1) We can’t have it both ways, we can’t use it and say that it means something else but get mad when people of other races use it
2) If the people that she was with didn’t think it was in malice, why should I or you, they know her and who she is at heart.
3) If you’re advocating the non-usage of the word in anybody’s, Black or others, vocabulary then please explain to me how this would improve Black people and our communities as a whole.
Other than that Negus Please!