The Negro Project

I generally just start writing these things. No apologies for the silliness. You wouldn’t want me to always be serious, would you? That would be great for you, benefiting from the pinpoint focus of my boundless intelligence, but what would I get out of it? I already know everything. So I get silly. But this isn’t a topic for silliness.

You thought I was kidding, didn’t you, a while back when I mentioned Sanger and abortion and the Negro Project. No joke. It’s like Holocaust jokes, although I don’t actually know any. Abortion jokes. All those dead Jews and babies are really funny though. Same deal with racist genocide. It’s funny when ... when ... well, it’s only funny when it vents some of the pain. Hardly ever.

The Negro Project. Nowadays, black women are three times more likely to have an abortion than white women, the overwhelming majority of said procedures provided by Planned Parenthood, which as a community service has made certain that 78% of their clinics are in minority neighborhoods. Blacks make up an eighth of the general population, but have over a third of the abortions. Affirmative action at work.

Why all these minority abortions? Well, in a way, the question answers itself. If it weren’t for all that aborting, they wouldn’t stay minorities. That would be calamitous, from a white racist point of view such as yours. And from the black perspective, think of it as a sort of economic release valve. Blacks earn less, so have less incentive to keep their babies? Well, no, the argument doesn’t quite stand up, when we understand that contraceptives are free for the taking -- generously provided for some reason or other to the underprivileged, then, by over-privileging them with population control mechanisms. Very generous and liberal of them, those abortion providers.

But let me be direct. Margaret Sanger was a eugenicist: eu meaning good, genicist meaning, uh, race. Inferior and unfit individuals and races such as Africans and Asians and South Americans and Indians of any continent or subcontinent and Australians and Middle Easterners and islanders and Antarcticans and I feel like I'm leaving a continent or significant landmass out, maybe swarthy Italians or Greeks and Spaniards who are practically Hottentots -- but they should all be exterminated. In her 1922 book, Pivot of Civilization, Sanger proposed sterilizing the “genetically inferior races” -- which I have thoughtfully just enumerated, as all save her own … you know, her own. But mostly it would be the race indigenous to sub-Saharan Africa. Exterminate. She was a Dalek.

To advance her philosophy, this pioneer founded the American Birth Control League and placed, for example, Lothrop Stoddard on the Board of Directors. Stoddard was the distinguished author of the opus, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy; when Hitler rolled around, Stoddard was right behind him, or beside him, cheering. Funnily enough, Hitler was right behind or beside Sanger.

Fun Fact: Hitler’s eugenics program was modeled on experiments in California reported by Dr. Paul Popenoe in his article “Eugenic Sterilization,” published in Sanger’s Birth Control Review.

The American Birth Control League was renamed Planned Parenthood after the philosophy of eugenics lost some of its luster, post-Holocaust. Something about ovens will do that, take the glow off fine intellectual constructs that neglect to attribute full humanity to various individuals and groups. Somebody should investigate this phenomenon; it would make an interesting paper.

Her finest moment came in 1939, when Sanger proposed The Negro Project. She recruited black doctors and ministers to her aims by stressing the benefits of childlessness, guaranteed through contraception, sterilization and abortion. Accidents happen, after all, and no one as our lawfully elected President Obama has reassured us should be punished for an accident. W.E.B. Dubois signed on, as did Dr. Adam Clayton Powell -- big-time olden days Negroes ... you're so ignorant.

The purpose of The Negro Project? “The most successful educational approach to the Negro,” asseverated Ms. Sanger, “is through a religious appeal. We do not want the word to get out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it occurs to any of their more rebellious members.” Those exasperating blacks. Well, who am I to contradict the NAACP? -- the National Association for the Abortion of Colored People. Speaking as a white and therefore Colorless Person, I have no right to an opinion. I wish I had a color. Be that as it may, in 2004 the just-referenced venerable institution officially endorsed abortion. Rah rah rah, gooooooooo ABORTION!

Upshot? Here it is, three generations later. Still a lot of blacks running around. But all is not lost. An analysis from 2000 showed that areas with a large black representation had a large number of abortion clinics, whereas areas with low black population -- Idaho, North Dakota, Utah, Wyoming -- had no Planned Parenthood abortion facilities. I suppose it could be a coincidence.

It’s just freaky weird. Here the liberals are, on the one hand doing everything in their power to insure a high black teen pregnancy rate, and on the other doing everything they can to abort the babies. Are they looking for business? Abortion is after all a multi-billion dollar industry. But that’s just stupid, it must be. There are easier ways to make a buck. Legalize drugs, for example. The lefties would be gazillionairs. Who says capitalism and socialism cannot co-exist? Look at MediCare. So it can’t be just about, uh, stimulating the economy. What other purpose could there be, in destroying the family structure by encouraging fatherlessness, in promoting promiscuity in impressionable and vulnerable youth, in setting up an endless archipelago of abortion mills that runs like an insane connect-the-dots spiderweb through black communities? What purpose?

I am urged somehow to summon up an image of Moloch, his sneering lips pulled back across brazen fangs, his huge gaping mouth drooling blood as the inferno in his belly grows even hotter with the spongy flesh of babies turned to charcoal. What purpose in it?

There are real conspiracies ... that coming together in the single breath of common cause which must not suffer the touch of sunlight lest their aim whatever it may be should wither with shame. I doubt if those behind it all even know what master they serve. There are no geniuses involved. Indeed, there is a point at which simple ignorance becomes Satanic. This is an instance where ignorance truly is no excuse. To call the tearing limb from limb of the unborn a choice -- it is unconscionable. These are just words though. Good lord. If the abortion can’t convince you, maybe the racism will. A lot of us don’t know yet that abortion is bad. We all know by now that racism is. Can you make the leap? Draw the connection between the two? Or is your imagination too frail, or your conscience too calloused.

Abortion? Do NOT click here, or here, if pictures of medical waste might disturb you. Are these babies and baby pieces black? One can hardly tell. It certainly could not possibly matter in the slightest. Well, look around for yourself. Here. Here. It’s not hard to find. Google “negro project”. Have fun.

I’ve been putting off writing this. I like to be silly, and this isn’t the place. I’m a passionate man, although I try to hide it. Time and the pain that it brings has matured me, and I can control my anguish over the unspeakable injustice that underpins every human institution and endeavor. We can deal with the vileness of life through simple coping mechanisms. Distraction. Avoidance. Transference. Intoxication. So I can live in a world of casual cruelty and toxic selfishness. The distance from murder to genocide is just a matter of who’s doing it, individuals or governments. Neither need unsettle me. I know what the world is. It is a place where black babies are killed, and white, and brown, and every other human color, wholesale, with the encouragement of their mothers, and preachers, and government social workers, and elected politicians.

There is a way to stop it, all this misuse of power. It involves a mere mental shift. It boils down to two simple precepts:

The innocent must be protected.
Humanity is inherent.

I can’t be any clearer than that.


J

Ethniquette

Clarence Page has been keeping closer tabs on the matter than I. I was raised to loathe hypocrisy, and then I found that I had been around it all the while, so I don't claim to be entirely balanced on the issue. Thus, that the nigger jesse jackson has made a career of race-hustling and extorting corporations for funds so that he won't instigate false-indignation boycotts against them -- that's merely slimy and corrupt. Nothing exceptional there, among that subclass of politicos and false prophets that pushes self- interest over probity and honor. It's this nigger thing.

Page notes the nig. jackson's ongoing need for "apologizing" -- which term in this instance uses not the standard definition, of expressing contrition for acknowledged wrong-doing, but has recourse rather to the Greek, being a sort of "explanation", or, specifically, a self-serving jumble of words that says nothing while somehow creating the false impression that jackson, a nigger, is not, despite every appearance, scum.

Page is black, and is therefore, according to common custom, specially qualified to have opinions on matters of race, far beyond that allowed to people of non-color. This characterization is no reflection on Page himself -- it may not be his conceit. I couldn't help but be aghast, however, when the charlatan Al Sharpton was interviewed on this nigger matter on the Hannety or O'Reilly show, which ever. What in the world qualifies this skin-huckster to speak for anything other than a streetcorner three-card monty con? Well, he's a black man who has pushed himself forward by virtue of his loud voice and inability to feel shame. Point being, the media has no "nuts" -- jackson and his ilk having cut them off -- and therefore will play the female role in the perverted relationship that the Left has with minorities.

Page seems generally to be a sensible man, however, and not someone who has reached a level of prominence regardless of a lack of actual productive talent. It is therefore with respect, that I disagree with him. Specifically, Page says, "Ethnic etiquette has always given greater latitude to epithets expressed about one's own ethnic group, as long as they are expressed inside of one's own ethnic group. That's how people talk within one's family or ethnic group, especially when you regard your ethnic group as affectionately as you regard any other extension of your nuclear family."

Yes, I suppose etiquette has always done that. But there has always been slavery, too -- still is, in fact, in Africa and the Middle East. The institutional racism that is now both unlawful and extinct in the USA, however, in the past invited the us-against-them "brotherhood" that may have included such affectionate sobriquets as nigger. Now, though, if the word still has power to harm, it should not be used. If it doesn't, it is encouraged for all to use it, in its affectionate benevolence. In America, part of equality requires that there be no double-standards.

I take exceptional exception, however, to Page's assertion that "That's how people talk within one's family or ethnic group." What an extraordinary statement. Never in my life have I heard a racial slur used affectionately in my family. My brothers never once called me white boy or honky or cracker or any such element of the catalog of racist epithets. I have never been around white men or women who have called each other by such names. I've heard such terms applied by other races. I've heard such terms used against oneself, in racially mixed company. But the idea that such terms are normative in the broader American culture -- it is an extraordinary proposition.

Page goes on to say that racial slurs are especially welcome "when you regard your ethnic group as affectionately as you regard any other extension of your nuclear family." Alas, racism is not a negative thing only -- a hatred of some other group. It is also an exclusionary affection of one's own group. Hitler's aryans spring to mind. To love your "race" as you love your family simply because it is your race, well, it's just sick. We all know this, from our exposure to KKK racists on the Jerry Springer Show. Ah luv mah wat rice. I bear Page no ill-will for his unexamined and unconscious racism, accidentally revealed here. It is a not uncommon flaw. But a member of your "race", loved as "any other" "member" of your "extended family"? Page cannot see the obscenity, here.

The nigger jackson must be held to a higher standard, says Page, "because he has held us to one, too." Very true. "The Nigger of the 'Narcissus.'" "Nigger Heaven." "Ten Little Niggers." "Nigger in the Window." "The Student As Nigger." "That Nigger's Crazy." "You know you're a nigger if..." Literature and art are not incognizant of the word. Was that the nigger jackson's meaning? He is an artist? other than a con-artist? No. He is a nasty, slimy hypocrite, and when Page supposes some special love that ethnic groups in general, and blacks in particular have for their own group, he cannot have the nig. jackson in mind. The nig. jackson loves only himself. We know this by his corruption, venality, hypocrisy and vulgarity.


J

Niggers

Tellin niggers how to behave. Tellin niggers how to behave. Niggers. Nigger nigger nigger. Nigger.

Quote: telling niggers how to behave; end quote.

"...talking down to black people ... telling niggers how to behave."

The reverend jesse jackson, renowned nigger community leader ... influential nigger and spokesman ... uh, a nigger of great prominence ... the reverend jesse jackson, protégé of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr, slain nigger leader ...

Last week jackson was caught on tape saying he wanted to cut Barack Obama's nuts off. You know, castrate him, that time-honored punishment for uppity niggers. Obama, a nigger, has been talkin down to black people, y'see, telling niggers how to behave. Oh. Sorry. We didn't talk about that part, last week. It wasn't in the tape that was released. There were rumors, denied, and now confirmed. The rest of the story, or a part of the rest of it, is the quote listed and paraphrased and permutated and mined for its true meaning, above.

The commie faggot nigger lover website from which I take this story seems most outraged ... no, seems only outraged by the conduct and existence of Fox News.

I will not participate in the charade. Cunt is not a word reserved for the use solely of women, of themselves. It's not their word. Words that are used for rage and hatred and dehumanizing contempt are rendered harmless by neither the arrogance nor the ignorance of their users.

I'll just spell it out. jackson didn't call Obama a nigger. Not that we know of. He called black people niggers. What scum. Someone should tell that nigger how to behave.


J

Identity

I heard Obama yesterday in a radio clip of an interview he gave to a Nevada newspaper. He was talking about the importance of Reagan as a break from the past, who 'changed the trajectory of America, in a way that Richard Nixon did not, and in a way that bill clinton did not.' (From memory.) He talked about the excesses of the sixties and seventies, rather than mouthing the predictable Democrat cliche of the excessive eighties. He mentioned the expansion without any accountability of government.

I was impressed. It was a very smart analysis. It showed a lot of awareness. It didn't appeal to the bigotry of his natural constituency. If his political ideas were as smart as his analysis -- well, he'd be a conservative. What a waste. The bright spot is, if he were to be elected, maybe he does indeed have some common sense. Maybe the realities of politics and the long history of liberal failure would crack through his indoctrination.

I heard a clip of him on the sharpton radio show -- catering to all your black racist and grievance-mongering needs -- and he was talking about "our" community. Well. So much for his transcending race. But reality is what it is. If a white politician seeking high office were to use such language, he'd be tarred and feathered. As it were. Obama said, "When the American economy gets a cold, black America gets pneumonia." A funny line. Two things about it. First, it's true. Second, Obama is not color blind, and very clearly identifies with his African roots. Racist? No, probably just racial. We need to make that distinction. I don't, a lot. But I've got that middle class white thing going on, of pretending to think that there should be no official distinctions, and no behavioral ones either. All our discrimination, or most of it, should be mental.

When Obama ran against Allen Keyes in Illinois for the Senate in 2004, Keyes (reportedly) made some point about Obama not being an authentic black, because he wasn't descended from slaves. Good lord. Keyes is a black conservative, who seems to have gone insane. He runs for president every election, and when he first came on the scene, I would have voted for him. But he seems a little mad. Obama apparently shrugged or laughed the comment off. That was the right way to handle it. Good lord. What an idea. You're not a Jew unless you survived the Nazi ovens? You're not Armenian unless the Turks tried to kill your grandparents? I hadn't realized that roots in slavery was the watermark of authentic negritude. My spell checker didn't flag that word.

Anyway, it turns out that the guy I picked up at the airport wasn't my son. In fact, I wasn't even at the airport. It was a bus station. Funny how I could have made that mistake. My actual son had to catch a shuttle, and came in about midnight. When he found that other poser there, tearing up my comic book collection, he tossed him out into the gutter. Such a wonderful son I have.

We rolled today at the Y. I got him a couple of times, but he got me once with an arm bar. That rarely happens. He's only been able to train in chunks of a month or so, per year. He probably has 5 months total of steady rolling. He seems to be gifted. And he is hellaciously strong. In a month or so he's going to be getting me regularly. I hardly know what to think about that. I'd like to grind the punk into the mat every time. All of those punks should be pulped, by me, all the time. Damn punks. But my son's excellence is my excellence, so I can't really lose. It is bothersome, being fiftyish. So much lost potential. If my son is a gauge, I really might have been something special, 25 years ago. As it is, I'm just a stubborn middle-aged man. It'll have to do.


J

Not Thug Enough

Yeah, I'd vote for Obama, except he's not black enough.

In South Carolina, The Reverend Jessie Jackson on the 18th "sharply criticized presidential hopeful and Illinois Sen. Barack Obama for 'acting like he’s white' in what Jackson said has been a tepid response to six black juveniles’ arrest on attempted-murder charges in Jena, La." Six against one. No matter the color, these punks can hardly be treated with sufficient harshness. Or is it okay, because their victim was white? Could it be that Obama is against violent crime, and isn't likely to make public excuses for scum? Is this what Jackson thinks is "acting white"? If that's what acting white is, then maybe the racists are right. The white racist I mean. Black racists like Jackson seem to think that mob attacks on random individuals are permissible if there is sufficient emotion involved. But I suppose that's racism in general.

Furck.

Poor Obama. He's not black enough for black racists like Jesse Jackson, and he's not white enough for white racists like, like -- um, well, I'm sure there are still white racists. I'll call up Al Sharpton for the list. And I suppose I'll have to pencil in my name at the bottom, cuz even thinking this way makes me a racist too. Imagine! Me saying there are black racists. The gall!

Obama's mother was white. His father was black. So he's black? Why isn't he white? It used to be called a touch of the tarbrush. A drop of black blood (I thought blood was red) and you can't vote. Odd, isn't it, how it's the black racists nowadays who are perpetuating that ideology -- not the voting part, the blackness part. Poor Obama just can't pass. For black. High yellow ain't black. Or maybe it's something to do with ghetto behavior.

Furck.

Isn't the world evil enough, without this? I'd never vote for Obama, but it has to do with his positions on issues. I'd vote for Condie. I'd vote for JC Watts. Of course they're not black enough either. Not for The Reverend Jackson ... The Rev. Jessie Jackson ... yes, I think so. jessie jackson.

jackson must have been driven insane by the hardships of his youth. I roll with a black fella who comes in now and again with stories of sitting for 45 minutes or an hour and a half while the cops check out his registration. My secondary anger over this sort of thing doesn't count for anything. The evil that has overtaken me sprang from a less specific pit, that bred more violent monsters. But we can't compare evils. To die from hunger or from thirst -- it would be no blessing if we were given to choose.

But jackson? When in the past 40 years has he been thirsty? When has he missed a meal? He is a sewer of discord. And by sewer I mean cesspool, not planter. Of course I'm not allowed to talk this way. I'm white, you see. Pink, yellowish-orange, salmon, frog-belly, cracker-colored, turkeybreast whitemeat -- whatever. I'm a one-man Rainbow Coalition, but it all pans out to too too white. In jackson's world, I can't vote.

"Later, Jackson [sic] said he did not recall making the 'acting like he’s white' comment about Obama..." No, of course he didn't. Hardly anyone is racist on purpose. Six thugs brutalized some kid. What does color have to do with it? jackson found the way.

Later still, jackson attempted to kiss Obama's big black ass by releasing this: "I reaffirm my commitment to vote for Sen. Barack Obama. He has remarkably transcended race..." Maybe it wasn't so much ass-kissing as sucking on his big black penis. Blacks have big penises, you know.


J

Unforgiven

Yeah, I saw it. It made me sad. And it was uncalled for. He just about started a riot.

Michael Richards. Kramer. From Seinfeld. Couple nights ago Richards was on stage at a comedy club in LA, heckled by a couple of black audience members, and off he went on a rant about niggers and mother fuckers. Sorry to be graphic. It's a graphic subject. Caught on tape. YouTube. And an apology via satellite on Letterman. He was all hunched up and awkward. Kramer, it seems, wasn't so much a character as an alterego. Does anyone else understand that?

As for the two Afro-American hecklers, they've hired Gloria Allred (Discrimination Attorney & Feminist Lawyer (that's what she calls herself (did you ever notice that she wears all red? (Isn't that clever? (She frightens me. (I'm afraid she'll castrate me.)))))) and are taking legal action against him. So let me get this straight -- they interrupt his act with very insulting comments ("you're not funny" to a comedian is about as invalidating as you can get) and when this high-strung performer engages them in his intense and free-association way, and after they in turn respond by calling him "cracker" and suchlike -- after all this, they not only don't like the result, but sue him?

There is an implicit contract in such venues. People go to laugh, and performers try to make them laugh. Sometimes the performer isn't funny. People feel cheated. The proper response to that is to ask for a refund. Not attack the performer. In turn, performers should maintain professional standards. Both parties broke the contract. The party that started the conflict, is suing. Hmm.

I've paid attention to Richards' career since 1980. I knew his aunt then (she owned the royalties to the first crossword dictionary, as I recall), and he was on a Saturday Night Live ripoff called Fridays. It was really bad. I remember a skit that was a parody of the Three Stooges, as coke heads. Ho. Ho. Richards did a recurring scene where he was a weird kid in a sandbox, melting toy soldiers with a magnifying glass or matches or something. Slow and not at all funny. At all. There was a voiceover of a mother who always yelled at him -- "Just you get in here right now, little mister." There was a scene of Richards at the door of his father's apartment, begging to be let it. "I have no son," said the father. "I don't know you." Turned out that Richards was at the wrong door. It wasn't meant to be funny.

And of course there was the time that guest host Andy Kaufman refused to read his lines, and Richards angrily got the cue cards and slammed them down in front of Kaufman -- who threw a glass of water in Richards' face. The cast got into a brawl. The show was live, mind you. The scene was reenacted for the movie, Man on the Moon. Turns out Kaufman and Richards hatched it up beforehand. Kaufman pulled the same water stunt with a wrestler on Letterman, I recall. That was also a hoax. That Kaufman. That Richards.

After Seinfeld, Richards' career tanked. Failed sitcom, reported nervous breakdown, failed movie. And a couple nights ago, he made another bad career choice.

So what.

I saw Paul Rodriguez, the fat spick faggot comedian, acting as spokes-hole for the comedy club. "Michael Richards will not be allowed on this stage, until, until ... he gets permission from the African American community." And the tone of pansy indignation dripped from his lips like ... well, you know. He was winging it. He didn't know how long Richards wouldn't be allowed to appear. What sounds good, Paul? Oh, how about "until he gets absolution"? And be sure to sound really disapproving. A little vocal tremor, maybe, like the PC pussy you are.

Rodriguez is a hypocrite. I've heard his racist act. Racist? My race is good, yours (mine) is bad. Now laugh. To me, that's racist.

A hep radio station played a clip of some black comedian ranting about whitebread cracker turkeys. Not talking about some kind of sandwich. Nobody appeared on BET to apologize about that. Entertainment Tonight didn't have a word to say. Hmm.

I could not care less about racist black and Mexican comedians. I know they're racist. Don't care. They mean nothing to me. What I do care about is the double standard. You don't get affirmative action, plus an eternal sense of grievance. One buys off the other. That's the deal. You're being bought. Bought and paid for. Like chattel. Like a slave on the block. (Pretty funny, huh? I'm a white racist comedian, and very insensitive.)

So there it is. Richards is an emotional man with issues, and lashed out at people who were lashing out at him. The lash he used is, historically speaking, unfortunate. But if Paula Poundstone can feel up her pubescent foster daughter and friend and be forgiven, I should think Richards need not be ruined.

How soon he might be absolved (partially) will be a measure of the emotional IQ of the "African American community" -- to cite the phrase of a wetback queer. People are offended, in such cases of impersonal racism, because they feel vulnerable. The racist words of a racist black, or Mexican, comedian mean nothing to me, because such words are about the speaker, not about me. But not everyone has that perspective. This is why blacks can call each other nigger til the sun sets, but I'd better not. The anger/fear emotion kicks in, and takes shape as anger. In the past, fear would have been appropriate. I understand, in the general. This is another reason that I don't even need to forgive. There is no offence.

What. What. Oh ... "fat spick faggot" ... "wetback queer." I, I ... I've been on edge lately. I'm just angry. I don't know what happened. I don't understand.

Oh god, what have I done.

*****

Once upon a time, as I have sometimes said, there was a man who was a teacher. Generally he taught teens, but one year he had a class of little ones, mostly Spanish-speaking background, but that class had some black children. (It’s okay to say “black”, right?) One little boy did have some pretty aggravated behaviour problems, but the man was a patient man, and the boy made good progress. One day the man had the child stay in for recess (remember recess?) and the little boy was extremely sad that none of his protestations or excuses could get him out of this. And then he said, “It’s because I’m black.” The man squatted down, and took hold of the boy's hands, and looked him in the eyes, and talked to him a bit. And the child threw himself into my arms like he’d never let go, and sobbed to break your heart.

Gentleness matters.

Here’s the point. Some stupid adults had taught this child a very evil excuse. I suppose they’d never heard that most famous idea of Martin King’s -- about the content of a man’s character. Perhaps they were preoccupied looking about for throwing-sized stones to hurl at racists. May the Lord rebuke them.

*****

We are all fools.


J

WARNING: Offensive Content!

Which, as you must know by now, is a redundancy. Come here and you may be offended. I don't go for it -- it's not on purpose. But any strong opinion stated unapologetically, as one will find here, is inherently offensive, to a certain mindset. Those people can go get fucked. No, that wasn't the offensive part. Just rude. And arrogant. And rather meaningless. Since when is getting fucked a bad thing? Now if I'd said they can get fornicated -- that's bad. It contains the idea of immorality. You can't fornicate with your wife. But as for the other, well. And notice how I avoided using fuck in a legitimate context, to describe the actual act itself, with one's spouse? What's that about? Well, it would have been disrespectful to you. You make love to your wife. But all that is neither here nor there. It's not the offensive part.

What, then? Hmm. Did you hear that some Virginia senator is being attacked now, because a couple of, uh, witnesses have come forward during his campaign and are saying he used the N word back in the '70s and early '80s? The accusers are closely associated with Left or Democrat politics, but even so, maybe the charge is true. Maybe Senator Allen, some twenty five or thirty years ago, said nigger.

My grandfather was born in 1899. He lived his whole life in the northern midwest. Montana. North Dakota. A railroad man. He never knew a black man. But I remember as a child in the '60s hearing him talk about the coons. Coons. Coontown. "What's a coon, mom?" "That's a Negro, honey." Not a word I've ever used, in my own voice. Never used kike. Never used spick. Etc. Not how I was raised. It was, however, how my grandfather was raised. Coons is the word he knew, for black people. Or am I being insensitive? Is it African American? Or Afro-American? Or person of color? Or colored? Or Negro? I'm not really white, you know. More a pinkish-yellow -- sort of a light salmon. What we used to call skin color, back when I used crayons. But yeah, I'm white. And my African countrymen? Black seems like an okay way to describe the condition. But not, not, not nigger.

Driving home from a place today, I heard a replay of Oprah Winfrey, on a right-wing radio show. She was intoning about how white folk used to give her mother used clothes. Now she's got white folk working for her. Lots of them. They good workers. There's Bill. Hi Bill. See? He's smiling. And Tony there. Oh yeah. They work real good. And now I give the used clothes. Mm hmm. And on and on.

Did Bill do a little shuffling dance, for Oprah? A happy buck and wing, white teeth gleaming in his white face? Because Bill would have understood Oprah's ironical and greater meaning. He could have felt no discomfort, being singled out before her national audience. She was not misusing her very great influence and power in the slightest. Because one of the things people are for, is to stand as object lessons. And Bill is a sophisticated man. He's in on the joke. As are you and I.

And when the fellas on the basketball court want the ball passed to them, nigger, and hussle there, nigger, and throw me the ball nigger? Well years ago Richard Pryor went to Africa, and when he came back he had resolved not to use the word anymore. Because the Africans weren't niggers. Get it?

It's not okay for the fellas on the court to use it, but not me. It's wrong of them. But they say fuck just as much. So. Why will I say fuck, as I do, in my angry and casual moments, but not the other?

A few weeks ago I was chillin' with my homies ... hangin' with my bros, my peeps -- no, I can't carry it off. I was cooling down and relaxing after my exercise, and a couple of fellas ... could I say friends? It seems so intimate, and is surely too intense a word ... a couple of the fellas were talking about getting a certain ethnic food. I was right there. I wasn't eavesdropping. And one fella, J, with a pronounced hesitance, with a notable embarrassment, with palpable vulnerablity, said, confessed -- it was obvious what was coming -- that he was reluctant to try such and such a cuisine because of the people who cooked it. The other fella indicated an attitude something less than scorn. I don't recall if I said it out loud. People have a right to their feelings. He knows he's wrong. I think I kept my mouth shut. Because scorn too, and something less, is a feeling we have a right to.

We have a right to be the people our parents taught us to be. If they taught us wrongly, we have a right to be wrong. If the foul-mouthed Richard Pryor has an epiphany beneath the equatorial sun of the Eastern and Southern Hemispheres, and if the enlightened Oprah makes the observations she made under the klieg lights of her studio -- if grandfathers and basketball players and fellas deciding where to eat are faced in varying degrees with their upbringing and the broadest applications of its effect in the world, well, there is a lesson, surely, in all that.

The Code of Moses had a provision for unwitting sin. Now we give offense all unawares, and bear the opprobrium of it until we find forgiveness. Just what the fuck did he mean by that? Who the hell does he think he is? And we have an enemy. For my part, I have enemies. Real enemies, and the harm they have effected was not limited to words or harsh opinions. I do not need forgiveness, for any of my actions in matters tangential to all this. I do need to forgive. Desperately.

There are offenses, you see, that go beyond words and attitudes. The harm they cause is beyond the reach of any statute. And there is no rational possibility for redress, for apology, for retribution, for justice, for satisfaction. There is only rage, or its opposite. What is the opposite of rage? Peace? No. Love? No. Forgiveness.

Grandpa Jack? -- you are forgiven. Senator Allen? -- forgiven. Basketball guys? -- forgiven. Oprah? -- forgiven. J? -- forgiven. It is so easy to forgive those who have not offended me. But that's all I can say, of forgiveness. Because my wrath is righteous, and the harm done to those I have loved is unspeakable. Nigger seems such a slight little bit of speech, compared to what is unspeakable.

You will have noticed something, of course. I do. I do. I most certainly do. Need. Forgiveness.



J