Jesse Jackson, Paul Mooney Call for End of N-Word
By BET.com Staff
Posted Nov. 27, 2006 – Comedian Paul Mooney certainly didn’t create the N-word, but he helped breath new life into it just as it was going out of favor, often joking that “I say nigger 100 times a day; it keeps my teeth white.”
Now, in light of the recent scandal involving “Seinfeld” co-star Michael Richards' on-stage racial rant, Mooney has announced he would no longer use the N-word and is challenging everyone else to follow suit. Mooney made the pledge on Rev. Jesse Jackson’s radio show, “Keep Hope alive,” and has repeated it on national television. Jackson also called for a boycott of the word.
Mooney, a veteran comic and writer for Richard Pryor, “Sanford and Son,” “Good Times” and more, had routinely used the word even after his good friend Richard Pryor renounced the word during his landmark 1983 concert film “Richard Pryor Live at the Sunset Strip.” Mooney’s use of the word in the 1970s made it a funny punctuation in jokes about Blacks, as in “Nigga please!” Soon, movie producers were using the word to make on-screen dialogue more graphic and street-wise or to shock an audience who didn’t hear that word in polite society. Soon, the word was part of street dialogue and embraced by the crunkest of the hip-hop world. By the 1990s, a whole generation of Blacks and other young people had grown up with the word as part of every day urban dialect.
When previously polled on the subject, 40 percent BET.com users said use of the word was wrong. However, 36 percent of you still used it despite feeling the word was wrong to use.
DISCUSS NOW: In the past, calls to boycott the N-word have come mostly from the political/activist crowd but with entertainer Mooney joining the cause, do you feel it will have a real effect? Does asking for a boycott on a word change the feelings behind it?
