The Futility of Existance

[Kevin]

Existance is futile if you're Martin Luther King. MLK tops my list as
the most futile existance that there ever was. MLK's dream becomes a
reality when a nigger wakes up in the morning and begins a racist rant
that lasts until bedtime... and there is no obstacle to said nigger
gaining employment at a task he is marginally qualified to perform.
Serial killing is not a plan that will work, people... 'k? We need
control of nuclear weapons!!! Comparing a white guy to a serial killer
is a racist slur, for future referance... Of course, as we have all
been dutifully informed, it is impossible for a nigger to say anything
that is racist. If you're a scientist, being courteous to others is
racist against niggers. It doesn't matter if being courteous to others
is the only tenant of your religion. Religion is racist against
niggers.

The only reason to keep niggers is as pets or toys. Niggers have
sentimental value to some people, I suppose. Horses have sentimental
value to some people but horses do nothing in terms of their value to
a modern economy. A horse is an expensive toy of the wealthy
priveledged class...

[Sir Fred M. McNeill]

'You' never know. Just keep practicing those meaning giving stories.
I suspect the situation is similar throughout the universe.
The place supports information structures, everywhere. 'We'
have no idea as to why the place. 'Humans', of all races,
and all ETs, evolved like elsewhere, like scum or dust.
So 'we' confabulate and practice 'our' stories, even hubris
boosting 'god' stories.

[Dare]

"Sir Fred M. McNeill" <mmcn...@fuzzysys.com> wrote in message news:q75qk8hpmaakpi6ge...@4ax.com...

If the stories are recognized as "our" confabulations, it seems
the practice often fails to fulfill the need for meaning...
thus the feeling of futility. There can also be a sadness or sorrow
at giving up the comfort of hubris boosting stories...what's left?
There seems to be a void between letting go of some old empty stories
and finding a way to live with new stories lacking in such hubris.

[Sir Fred M. McNeill]

'Humans' have some very significant existential problems.
They come from 'our' legacy past in a changing context, now.
The 'fit' may not be survivable. Such is the 'way' of information
structure 'dust' in this weird uncaring 'place'.

[Immortalist]

Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/chap1/nigger.htm

By Randall Kennedy
Pantheon. 256 pp. $22
Friday, January 11, 2001


Chapter One

The Protean N-Word

How should nigger be defined? Is it a part of the American cultural
inheritance that warrants preservation? Why does nigger generate such
powerful reactions? Is it a more hurtful racial epithet than insults
such as kike, wop, wetback, mick, chink, and gook? Am I wrongfully
offending the sensibilities of readers right now by spelling out
nigger instead of using a euphemism such as N-word? Should blacks be
able to use nigger in ways forbidden to others? Should the law view
nigger as a provocation that reduces the culpability of a person who
responds to it violently? Under what circumstances, if any, should a
person be ousted from his or her job for saying "nigger"? What methods
are useful for depriving nigger of destructiveness? In the pages that
follow, I will pursue these and related questions. I will put a tracer
on nigger, report on its use, and assess the controversies to which it
gives rise. I have invested energy in this endeavor because nigger is
a key word in the lexicon of race relations and thus an important term
in American politics. To be ignorant of its meanings and effects is to
make oneself vulnerable to all manner of perils, including the loss of
a job, a reputation, a friend, even one's life.

Let's turn first to etymology. Nigger is derived from the Latin word
for the color black, niger. According to the Random House Historical
Dictionary of American Slang, it did not originate as a slur but took
on a derogatory connotation over time. Nigger and other words related
to it have been spelled in a variety of ways, including niggah,
nigguh, niggur, and niggar. When John Rolfe recorded in his journal
the first shipment of Africans to Virginia in 1619, he listed them as
"negars." A 1689 inventory of an estate in Brooklyn, New York, made
mention of an enslaved "niggor" boy. The seminal lexicographer Noah
Webster referred to Negroes as "negers." (Currently some people insist
upon distinguishing nigger—which they see as exclusively an
insult—from nigga, which they view as a term capable of signaling
friendly salutation.) In the 1700s niger appeared in what the
dictionary describes as "dignified argumentation" such as Samuel
Sewall's denunciation of slavery, The Selling of Joseph. No one knows
precisely when or how niger turned derisively into nigger and attained
a pejorative meaning. We do know, however, that by the end of the
first third of the nineteenth century, nigger had already become a
familiar and influential insult.

In A Treatise on the Intellectual Character and Civil and Political
Condition of the Colored People of the United States: and the
Prejudice Exercised Towards Them (1837), Hosea Easton wrote that
nigger "is an opprobrious term, employed to impose contempt upon
[blacks] as an inferior race. . . . The term in itself would be
perfectly harmless were it used only to distinguish one class of
society from another; but it is not used with that intent. . . . [I]t
flows from the fountain of purpose to injure." Easton averred that
often the earliest instruction white adults gave to white children
prominently featured the word nigger. Adults reprimanded them for
being "worse than niggers," for being "ignorant as niggers," for
having "no more credit than niggers"; they disciplined them by telling
them that unless they behaved they would be carried off by "the old
nigger" or made to sit with "niggers" or consigned to the "nigger
seat," which was, of course, a place of shame.

Nigger has seeped into practically every aspect of American culture,
from literature to political debates, from cartoons to song.
Throughout the 1800s and for much of the 1900s as well, writers of
popular music generated countless lyrics that lampooned blacks, in
songs such as "Philadelphia Riots; or, I Guess It Wasn't de Niggas Dis
Time," "De Nigga Gal's Dream," "Who's Dat Nigga Dar A-Peepin?," "Run,
Nigger, Run," "A Nigger's Reasons," "Nigger Will Be Nigger," "I Am
Fighting for the Nigger," "Ten Little Niggers," "Niggas Git on de
Boat," "Nigger in a Pit," "Nigger War Bride Blues," "Nigger, Nigger,
Never Die," "Li'l Black Nigger," and "He's Just a Nigger." The chorus
of this last begins, "He's just a nigger, when you've said dat you've
said it all."

Throughout American history, nigger has cropped up in children's
rhymes, perhaps the best known of which is





Eeny-meeny-miney-mo!
Catch a nigger by the toe!
If he hollers, let him go!
Eeny-meeny-miney-mo!



But there are scores of others as well, including





Nigger, nigger, never die,
Black face and shiny eye.



And then there is:





Teacher, teacher, don't whip me!
Whip that nigger behind that tree!
He stole honey and I stole money.
Teacher, teacher, wasn't that funny?



Today, on the Internet, whole sites are devoted to nigger jokes. At
KKKomedy Central-Micetrap's Nigger Joke Center, for instance, the
"Nigger Ghetto Gazette" contains numerous jokes such as the
following:





Q. What do you call a nigger boy riding a bike?
A. Thief!

Q. Why do niggers wear high-heeled shoes?
A. So their knuckles won't scrape the ground!

Q. What did God say when he made the first nigger?
A. "Oh, shit!"

Q. What do niggers and sperm have in common?
A. Only one in two million works!

Q. Why do decent white folk shop at nigger yard sales?
A. To get all their stuff back, of course!

Q. What's the difference between a pothole and a nigger?
A. You'd swerve to avoid a pothole, wouldn't you?

Q. How do you make a nigger nervous?
A. Take him to an auction.

Q. How do you get a nigger to commit suicide?
A. Toss a bucket of KFC into traffic.

Q. How do you keep niggers out of your backyard?
A. Hang one in the front yard.

Q. How do you stop five niggers from raping a white woman?
A. Throw them a basketball.



Nigger has been a familiar part of the vocabularies of whites high and
low. It has often been the calling card of so-called white trash—poor,
disreputable, uneducated Euro-Americans. Partly to distance themselves
from this ilk, some whites of higher standing have aggressively
forsworn the use of nigger. Such was the case, for example, with
senators Strom Thurmond and Richard Russell, both white supremacists
who never used the N-word. For many whites in positions of authority,
however, referring to blacks as niggers was once a safe indulgence.
Reacting to news that Booker T. Washington had dined at the White
House, Senator Benjamin Tillman of South Carolina predicted, "The
action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger will
necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they
will learn their place again." During his (ultimately successful)
reelection campaign of 1912, the governor of South Carolina, Coleman
Livingston Blease, declared with reference to his opponent, Ira Jones,
the chief justice of the state supreme court, "You people who want
social equality [with the Negro] vote for Jones. You men who have
nigger children vote for Jones. You who have a nigger wife in your
back yard vote for Jones."

During an early debate in the United States House of Representatives
over a proposed federal antilynching bill, black people sitting in the
galleries cheered when a representative from Wisconsin rebuked a
colleague from Mississippi for blaming lynching on Negro criminality.
In response, according to James Weldon Johnson of the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), white
southern politicians shouted from the floor of the House, "Sit down,
niggers." In 1938, when the majority leader of the United States
Senate, Allen Barkley, placed antilynching legislation on the agenda,
Senator James Byrnes of South Carolina (who would later become vice
president and secretary of state) faulted the black NAACP official
Walter White. Barkley, Byrnes declared, "can't do anything without
talking to that nigger first."

Nigger was also a standard element in Senator Huey P. Long's
vocabulary, though many blacks appreciated the Louisiana Democrat's
notable reluctance to indulge in race baiting. Interviewing "The
Kingfish" in 1935, Roy Wilkins (working as a journalist in the days
before he became a leader of the NAACP) noted that Long used the terms
"nigra," "colored," and "nigger" with no apparent awareness that that
last word would or should be viewed as offensive. By contrast, for
Georgia governor Eugene Talmadge, nigger was not simply a designation
he had been taught; it was also a tool of demagoguery that he self-
consciously deployed. Asked by a white constituent about "Negroes
attending our schools," Talmadge happily replied, "Before God, friend,
the niggers will never go to a school which is white while I am
governor."

As in Georgia, so in Mississippi, where white judges routinely asked
Negro defendants, "Whose nigger are you?" Reporting a homicide, the
Hattiesburg Progress noted: "Only another dead nigger—that's all."
Three decades later, the master of ceremonies at a White Citizens
Council banquet would conclude the festivities by remarking,
"Throughout the pages of history there is only one third-rate race
which has been treated like a second-class race and complained about
it—and that race is the American nigger."

Nor was nigger confined to the language of local figures of limited
influence. Supreme Court Justice James Clark McReynolds referred to
Howard University as the "nigger university." President Harry S Truman
called Congressman Adam Clayton Powell "that damned nigger preacher."
Nigger was also in the vocabulary of Senator, Vice President, and
President Lyndon Baines Johnson. "I talk everything over with [my
wife]," he proclaimed on one occasion early in his political career.
Continuing, he quipped, "Of course . . . I have a nigger maid, and I
talk my problems over with her, too."

A complete list of prominent whites who have referred at some point or
other to blacks demeaningly as niggers would be lengthy indeed. It
would include such otherwise disparate figures as Richard Nixon,
Edmund Wilson, and Flannery O'Connor.

Given whites' use of nigger, it should come as no surprise that for
many blacks the N-word has constituted a major and menacing presence
that has sometimes shifted the course of their lives. Former slaves
featured it in their memoirs about bondage. Recalling her lecherous
master's refusal to permit her to marry a free man of color, Harriet
Jacobs related the following colloquy:





"So you want to be married do you?" he said,

"and to a free nigger."

"Yes, sir."

"Well, I'll soon convince you whether I am your master, or the nigger
fellow you honor so highly. If you must have a husband, you may take
up with one of my slaves."



Nigger figures noticeably, too, in Frederick Douglass's autobiography.
Re-creating the scene in which his master objected to his being taught
to read and write, the great abolitionist imagined that the man might
have said, "If you give a nigger an inch he will take an ell. A nigger
should know nothing but to obey his master. . . . Learning would spoil
the best nigger in the world."

In the years since the Civil War, no one has more searingly dramatized
nigger-as-insult than Richard Wright. Anyone who wants to learn in a
brief compass what lies behind African American anger and anguish when
nigger is deployed as a slur by whites should read Wright's The Ethics
of Living Jim Crow. In this memoir about his life in the South during
the teens and twenties of the twentieth century, Wright attacked the
Jim Crow regime by showing its ugly manifestations in day-to-day
racial interactions. Wright's first job took him to a small optical
company in Jackson, Mississippi, where things went smoothly in the
beginning. Then Wright made the mistake of asking the seventeen-year-
old white youth with whom he worked to tell him more about the
business. The youth viewed this sign of curiosity and ambition as an
unpardonable affront. Wright narrated the confrontation that
followed:





"What yuh tryin' t' do, nigger, git smart?" he asked.

"Naw; I ain' tryin' t' git smart," I said.

"Well, don't, if yuh know what's good for yuh! . . . Nigger, you think
you're white, don't you?"

"No sir!"

"This is white man's work around here, and you better watch yourself."



From then on, the white youth so terrorized Wright that he ended up
quitting.

At his next job, as a menial worker in a clothing store, Wright saw
his boss and his son drag and kick a Negro woman into the store:





Later the woman stumbled out, bleeding, crying, and holding her
stomach. . . . When I went to the rear of the store, the boss and his
son were washing their hands in the sink. They were chuckling. The
floor was bloody and strewn with wisps of hair and clothing. No doubt
I must have appeared pretty shocked, for the boss slapped me
reassuringly on the back.

"Boy, that's what we do to niggers when they don't want to pay their
bills," he said, laughing.



Along with intimidation, sex figured in Wright's tales of Negro life
under segregationist tyranny. Describing his job as a "hall-boy" in a
hotel frequented by prostitutes, the writer remembered





a huge, snowy-skinned blonde [who] took a room on my floor. I was sent
to wait upon her. She was in bed with a thick-set man; both were nude
and uncovered. She said she wanted some liquor and slid out of bed and
waddled across the floor to get her money from a dresser drawer. I
watched her.

"Nigger, what in hell you looking at?" the white man asked me, raising
himself up on his elbows.

"Nothing," I answered, looking miles deep into the black wall of the
room.

"Keep your eyes where they belong if you want to be healthy!" he said.

"Yes, sir."



On a different evening at this same hotel, Wright was leaving to walk
one of the Negro maids home. As they passed by him, the white night
watchman wordlessly slapped the maid on her buttock. Astonished,
Wright instinctively turned around. His doing so, however, triggered
yet another confrontation:

Suddenly [the night watchman] pulled his gun and asked: "Nigger, don't
you like it?"

I hesitated.

"I asked yuh don't yuh like it?" he asked again, stepping forward.

"Yes, sir," I mumbled.

"Talk like it then!"

"Oh, yes, sir!" I said with as much heartiness as I could muster.

Outside, I walked ahead of the girl, ashamed to face her. She caught
up with me and said: "Don't be a fool! Yuh couldn't help it!"

This watchman boasted of having killed two Negroes in self-defense.

© 2002 Randall Kennedy

[benj]

On Sat, 23 Mar 2013 08:03:16 -0700, Immortalist wrote:

> On Mar 22, 12:09 pm, Kevin <barry196...@yahoo.com> insanely babbled:

>> Existance is futile if you're Martin Luther King. MLK tops my list as
>> the most futile existance that there ever was. MLK's dream becomes a
>> reality when a nigger wakes up in the morning and begins a racist rant
>> that lasts until bedtime... and there is no obstacle to said nigger
>> gaining employment at a task he is marginally qualified to perform.

<snip gigantic essay on the word "nigger">

The depth of Kevin's insanity can be viewed in the above paragraph. What
exactly was MLK's "dream"? Obviously, it was the ideal upon which America
was founded. namely that "all men are created equal". Here "men" clearly
means "mankind" which includes women. And equal, means not that everyone
is the same, but rather that there are no privileged classes that operate
under different rules than the commoners.

The institution of slavery creates just such different sets of rules. One
set for the masters, another for the slaves. Because of the African
source of slaves for the Americas these rules came to be divided along
racial lines.

Of course nobody wants to be a slave, so rules develop into a privileged
class and the underclass. But this idea is that of the monarchies in Old
Europe. It is a system rejected by the American ideal. But because of
slavery, the ideal in America was not quite so "ideal"!

Enter MLK, who stood up and simply said that the American ideal is that
there are no privileged classes. As entrenched as two level racial system
was in America I was convinced that MLK was pissing in the wind and the
Americans I knew would NEVER give up their ways. Much to my amazement (in
spite of all the liberal claims of all white men being racist) the old
system turned around on a dime! Amazingly even the most diehard rednecks
somehow innately sensed the truth that a privileged class is NOT what the
American ideal is about. Soon I was seeing big burly black and white
truck drivers giving each others hugs and I KNEW MLK has succeeded!

But today all is still not well with the American Ideal. The Tea Party
says, let us restore the constitution and American Ideal, and the leftist
liberals say, let us throw all that "bagger" stuff out and make America a
communist utopia! And the essence of that utopia, is making those in
power a privileged class! And oddly this rejection of the American Ideal
comes from an administration filled with blacks.

We still have a long way to go.

By the way, Kevin, you are STILL insane. No, I don't mean "Internet name-
calling insane", but real, true, DSM IV insane!
Give the other patients a turn at the terminal!