Word: nigger
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Trouble began last February, when Marlene Armstrong, 44, her two daughters and two grandchildren became the first black family to rent on an all-white west side Cleveland street. There were taunts (''Nigger! Get off the porch!''), broken windows, fireworks assaults, ugly spray-painted graffiti (KKK) on the side of the house. Someone installed a ceramic black jockey on the lawn. One night last week a gang of young whites began launching bottle rockets toward the Armstrong house, but suddenly the fun went out of it. A 23-year-old friend of the Armstrongs' fired a shotgun at the whites...
...them as coarse. Twain himself wrote that the book's banners considered the novel "trash and suitable only for the slums." More recently the book has been attacked because of the character Jim, the escaped slave whose adventures twine with Huck's, and its frequent use of the word nigger. (The term Nigger Jim, for which the novel is often excoriated, never appears...
Twain's racial pitch was not perfect. One is left uneasy, for example, by the lengthy passage in his autobiography about how much he loved what were called "nigger shows" in his youth--these were minstrel shows, mostly with white men performing in blackface--and his delight in getting his prim mother to laugh at them. Yet there is no reason to think Twain saw the shows as representing reality. His frequent assaults on slavery and prejudice suggest his keen awareness that they did not. The shows were simply a form of entertainment popular all over the country...
...Curtis Osborne, a small-time cocaine dealer and addict, killed two people in a dispute over $400. His crime revulsed the town of Griffin, Georgia, one measure of which was the bigoted remark a local inmate reported hearing at the jail: "That little nigger deserves the chair...
Both rappers and music execs are clamoring for solutions. Russell Simmons recently made a tepid call for rappers to self-censor the words nigger and bitch from their albums. But most insiders believe that a debate about profanity and misogyny obscures a much deeper problem: an artistic vacuum at major labels. "The music community has to get more creative," says Steve Rifkin, CEO of SRC Records. "We have to start betting on the new and the up-and-coming for us to grow as an industry. Right now, I don't think anyone is taking chances...