espn.go/espn/story/_/id/9980883/whitlock-using-n-word - The N-word is a not a generational issue. The N-word was never a fad. It was a primary tool in the enslavement, disenfranchisement and cultural destruction of a race of people. Its appropriate to laugh off our grandparents overreaction to Afros, hippies, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. Its inappropriate to analogize their overreaction to rational peoples repulsion at the aggressive mainstreaming of the N-word. The debate surrounding the N-word isnt young people versus old people. Its intelligence versus ignorance, values versus no values, family versus dysfunction and responsible/restrained capitalism versus capitalism left unchecked. Baby boomers, by and large, were raised in traditional two-parent households. They were educated in neighborhood schools by people who lived in those neighborhoods or ones just like them. Baby boomers strayed because they believed too authentically in the values their parents taught. They questioned authority because Americas wars and domestic policies relating to race contradicted what America preached. Baby boomers rebelled against American hypocrisy. The current generation of young people, the children and grandchildren of baby boomers, is not rebelling against anything. It is rebelling from neglect, a lack of attention and Americas overdose on materialism. This generation doesnt reflect its parents values because its parents were too busy chasing bigger homes and second cars to teach it any values, or its parents were simply absent for a multitude of reasons. My point is that the young people, from Jay Z to the kids in the Dolphins locker room to Matt Barnes, who think the N-word is a term of endearment or a word now devoid of its negative impact because of its popularity, are misguided in a way no previous American generation has been misguided. Can you misguide a generation that has never been guided?
Posted on: Sat, 16 Nov 2013 10:20:44 +0000
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