N-Slaving or N-Dearing

“I tell them niggas mind they biz, but they don’t hear me though.”
Fans within the hip-hop community took serious offense to this controversial lyric from the popular Jennifer Lopez song entitled “I’m Real” because of her brash use of the “n-word.”
“How dare she,” were the expressions many shared in the wake of the song’s release. “She has NO right!”
Lopez has been on the receiving end of a barrage of criticism from music listeners as well as members of the black community who feel the word is a mental shackle embedded in the minds of African-Americans by racists who coined the term.
“We claim to have transformed the meaning, yet we criticized J-Lo,” says Jason J. Bern, a law student from Oakdale. “I feel that the promotion of the word through entertainment is ignorant, and we are hypocrites.”
Many in the African-American community choose to abstain from its usage, while others
have chosen to embrace the word and identify with it because they feel that by using it, they have neutralized its power and taken away its “evil” derivation.
“We insult ourselves as well as our ancestors who had to endure lynching, hangings, and other atrocities so that we can be here today,” Reginald Rackley, assistant professor of the SU department of psychology.
The “n-word,” to many, has become apart of everyday slang, and is tossed about casually in conversation out of the mouths of young, black people.
“I accept it because I understand it’s a term of closeness. Others hear it and think ignorance, but our culture is very intelligent,” replied Tony Dooley, a law student from New Orleans. “The term ‘Niger’ has a rich history in our culture. It symbolizes a way of tying our youth together. Many cultures have taken a negative aspect of their history and carried it forward as a positive. This serves not only as a reminder, but a motivator of the future.”
Where does the “n-word” originate? It was derived from the Latin word “Niger,” which means black.
In an effort to dehumanize African people, racist slave-masters invented the word “Niger” to describe what they considered a subhuman race of malevolent beings.
Blacks were forced to identify themselves with this new title or face death. As so-called “niggers”, blacks were treated worse than animals and were subjected to some of the most gruesome acts of human cruelty in the history of American civilization. Still, the “n-word” has remained in the vocabulary of the descendents of the black slave.
“Because people are not conscious of their history, they use words without having the full understanding of the meaning behind the word,” said Rackley, ” So therefore, our perception is confused in the sense that we can’t recognize the word for being an insult. Consequently, we see the word as a term of endearment.”