THE N WORD - NOT NINJA

On Oprah today she broke her normal pattern of behavior by having a rapper on her show. I know she had Ludacris before but that was for the movie crash. You probably seen the show because it was a classic as I do not recollect Oprah having a rapper on there and giving him airtime ever. They talked about numerous things such as his Rocawear empire, his wife beyonce, his new CD the blueprint 3, etc...but what I wanted to touch on was what they agreed to disagree on, the use and misuse of the word "nigga". Jay-Z's point was that we give words power, and since we took a negative word and twisted it and embraced it, than it's ok to use it. He also stated that if we took every bad word out of the dictionary it would be replaced with another bad word the next day. A valid point. Oprah, on the other had, had a feasible argument that her generation (the one that grew up through the civil rights movement) could not see that word in a positive light ever. She said that all she thinks about when hearing that word is black men and women getting lynched and hearing it as a last word before they die. Oprah said her generation will have to die out and say from the grave "Jay-Z I disagree" even still in death. My take on this is that these are two valid points but Jay-Z is wrong. He is a hip-hop icon and has more influence on young black America than Oprah does, I didn't start watching her until I was about 20 but I was listening to Jay-Z since I was about 13. His CD The Blueprint was when I fell in love with hip-hop, and it had a song with the chick Amilion or something (what ever happened to her anyway?) called "Nigga what, Nigga Who", and I mean Jigga my nigga is said throughout a lot of his songs. I don't think Jay-Z uses it to degrade blacks but by the upkeep of the word it in turn upkeeps racism to a certain degree and the dreaded memories of slaves dying. I think the African-American race needs to rededicate themselves to their history, we have to constantly remind ourselves of what our ancestors went through to get us here. I recently got into a spat with a caucasian sorority girl of Lambda Tau Omega, because she thought that since black poeple said nigga around her, she could say it too....I was like WOW, but that's a "whole nother" blog, in short I put her in her place and she apologized. You see it's so bad that white collegiate sorotiy girls think it's ok to call us the n word. Nothing positive comes out of that word, and I recently started a twitter campaign to get people to stop saying it, and calling each other it. Nigga is a stupid word.

Only One OmegaMan with One OmegaOpinion,
CyrahOmega