Beyond The Barrio: NAACP Buries the N-Word In Detroit

And it ain’t ‘naco.’ At yesterday’s annual conference, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People had two horses draw a pine coffin to a historically Black Detroit cemetery to let everyone know that the N-Word is now dead to the organization. Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick even threw a couple of other words into the coffin so it wouldn’t get lonely:

We gather burying all the things that go with the N-word. We have to bury the ‘pimps’ and the ‘hos’ that go with it.

How does he plan to fit all those gator-skinned boots and clear platform heels into one casket? But the more obvious question is, what would it take for the rest of the world to follow suit?

Lucky for us, last night’s FOX 5 broadcast of local New York news brought on a spokesperson from the Congress of Racial Equality to share his answer. Mister Niger Innis said the rest of the world won’t condemn the N-Word until something he called “the music and entertainment industrial combine” does. (Couldn’t they have gotten somebody whose first name ISN’T one letter away from spelling n@$$*#?!) In our humble opinion, the word is too ingrained in faux thug, hip-hop culture (and therefore, the highly lucrative hip-hop biz) for it to budge any time soon.

Case in point: half-Puerto Rican, half-Cuban rapper Fat Joe has used the N-Word on his records for years, and in the process has gotten fellow Latinos from the Bronx to include it in their daily lingo. (Trust us: we know a couple of them.) If the NAACP can’t stop these guys from using it, what’re the odds it’ll stop Black people from using it? Our guess is slim to none.

NAACP Symbolically Buries N-Word In Detroit [Washington Post]
N-Word Image [Playa Hata]
Fat Joe Image [MTV]
Earlier, Marcelo Cunning: Meet the King Of the Nacos