Essay 1585

From The New York Daily News…

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No is the new N-word

Brooklynites find many follow their push to end hate speech

By Errol Lewis

What began as a few scattered pleas to abolish use of the N-word is fast turning into a full-blown national movement to drive careless, degrading racial hate-speech into a dark, cramped corner of our culture — and then out of existence altogether.

There have always been teachers, ministers and politicians who called on Americans to abandon use of what the Merriam-Webster dictionary — after protests from the NAACP and other groups — now defines as “perhaps the most offensive and inflammatory racial slur in English.”

What’s different now — and it’s a beautiful thing to see — is that people all over the country are jumping into the fight with little or no prompting, launching a thousand different teach-ins, lectures, boycotts and letter-writing campaigns to let Hollywood, Madison Avenue and the music business know that people are sick of being insulted and degraded at every turn.

The new militancy was on display last week, when more than 100 people crowded into a midtown club at an event called “Celebrities put an end to the N-word,” organized by two young Brooklynites, Jill Merritt and her husband, Kovan Flowers. Screenwriters, authors, film producers, news anchors, actors and comedians gave brief, impassioned speeches about the hate and harm of the N-word and vowed to do whatever they could to take it out of circulation.

The meeting was hosted by comedian Paul Mooney, who once ran a cottage industry of N-word humor as a writer for Richard Pryor but recently announced a change of heart.
“I want to live in a world without the N-word. And I believe one person can make a difference,” Mooney said. “That word is an evil word, and it conjures up all kinds of demons.”

Merritt and Flowers, who both work in the television business, are the creators of a powerful Web site — www.abolishthenword.com — that displays stark images of lynchings before asking visitors to pledge to drop the word from everyday speech.

After enjoying phenomenal success with the Web site — “we get e-mail from the KKK and the Aryan Nations on a regular basis, so we know we are doing something right,” says Merritt — the couple decided to stage events at the New York and L.A. Laugh Factory comedy clubs.

The space was donated by club owner Jamie Masada, who has been on a one-man crusade ever since the recent racist tirade by actor Michael Richards at Masada’s club in L.A. Masada now fines and suspends comics who include the N-word in their acts at the Laugh Factory.

Something good is stirring in the land. City Councilman Leroy Comrie (D-Queens) has introduced a resolution asking New Yorkers to swear off the N-word. In Chicago, Bryan Monroe, editorial director of Ebony and Jet magazines, recently announced that the N-word will no longer appear in either publication unless he personally approves it.

Everyone involved in this movement is a hero. Together, they are helping the N-word go the way of blackface minstrel shows, spittoons and other unappealing habits that America grew up with and learned to do without.