Most of all, though, I hate being compared to niggers--even implicitly--just because we happen to have the same skin color. Call me a "hater," I don't care; I hate them because they are making life miserable for me and every self-respecting black person in America.
You see, there is a fundamental difference between a nigger and a black person. This fact is seldom recognized in America, which is part of the reason why it's so damn confusing to be a black American. A "nigger" is, and always has been, a vessel that contains everything that has ever been negative and detestable about black people. When a white man calls me a nigger, he's calling me a stupid, lazy, worthless, inarticulate clown who will never amount to anything because I am genetically and fundamentally inferior to the entire human race. When a black man calls me a nigger, he's saying exactly the same thing.
You can distinguish a black person from a nigger easily enough, to paraphrase Asheru:
Black people are beautiful. Black people live lives as kings born to queens who never taught them what their reign means. Black people are learning, black people are building. Black people are finding their place at their own pace. Black people are having children, making symbolic unions with worthy women. Black people are the genitors of the dream soon to be deferred no more, the encore to our suffering from our elders' pain. Black people are destined reclaim our glory to continue our original story.
Now this distinction isn't always as clear as it should be, since many black people, myself included, occasionally loose their heads in a stressful moment and finds themselves behaving like niggers (we call this lapse of judgment a "nigger moment"). This makes it all the more confusing, because you can't always tell whether a black person truly is a nigger, or if he's just having a really shitty day. Even Bobby Seale--one of the righteous black men that ever lived--had an occasional nigger moment. A lot of black people these days are teetering on the edge of becoming full blown niggers; fortunately, we have no shortage of black people who can function as a social compass, letting us know what we should be aiming for.
For example: Mutulu Olugabala and Clayton Gavin from Dead Prez are black men. Samuel Jackson is a black man, Barrack Obama is a black man. Danny Glover and Denzel Washington are black men. Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Junior, Huey P. Newman, Bob Marley and Thurgood Marshall were black men. Dorothy Dandridge, Billy Holliday and Ella Fitzgerald were black women. Michelle Nichols, Diana Ross, Queen Latifah and Oprah Winfrey are black women.
It's important to note that, apart from maybe Snoop Dog and Mystical, there are few famous niggers (Colin Powell and Conodoleeza Rice are house niggers, which is a related but slightly different phenomenon). Thug, Gangsta, Playa', Pimp... all of those are just sub-classes of Nigger. Gangsta rappers and some of their fans actually internalize these ideas, live their entire lives by them, scorn and ridicule anyone who doesn't; these, too, are niggers. Of course, most rappers and some actors make their money by pretending to act like niggers for the entertainment white people and other niggers. That's called "cooning," which can sometimes be kind of entertaining as long as it's never mistaken for reality. For example, Katt Williams and (until recently) Mo'Nique built an entire career around what are essentially modernized black minstrel characters. So did Flavor Flav, for that matter, especially after MTV picked him up and decided to give him a nigger-themed reality show. And I'm still trying to figure out how the cast of Soul PLane aka "Niggers: the Motion Picture" manage to find the will to live with themselves after that cinematic abomination. What's really tricky though--and sometimes depressing--is trying to figure out which hiphop stars and actors are cooning for money, and which ones are just niggers who don't know any better.
Beyond the cesspool of commercialism that passes for "urban culture," it's a bit less complicated. Look around your school, your neighborhood, your place of business. Chances are you know a lot of niggers, more than you would prefer to know (just one is too many). But if you're very fortunate, you might know an ever greater number of black people who are not niggers. Maybe you know a lot of black people who are honest, who are thoughtful, who work hard, who don't waste energy or money on stupid shit that no one care's about. Black people, unlike niggers, have pride in themselves, in their heritage, in their families and communities. They don't sit around and complain about injustice, they fight it. They don't bitch and moan that the system is broken, they change it. They don't demand respect from anyone, they earn it. You can always recognize a black person because his dignity is sacred to him, even if his dignity is all he's got left. A nigger doesn't give a damn about dignity; if he has any left, he'll sell it to the lowest bidder and next thing you know he's on BET.
Too many black people are content to act like niggers even though they have the power and the brains to be something more. Whether they know it or not, when they accept that label, they accept everything that comes with it: they admit to the world that the are worthless, shiftless, lazy, hostile and untrustworthy. It's not specifically anyone's fault; niggers are a symptom of poverty, of deprivation, of disillusionment, but most importantly, of hopelessness. But even recognizing that they are products of their environment, I still hate niggers for the same reason I hate white supremacists: because of the lies they spread about me, because of the false images they created in my name, and because of the label they've stamped on my forehead and expected me to wear whether I like it or not. I don't care what color your skin is, don't you dare call me "nigger" with a straight face.
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