Nigga Please

--- I caught yesterday's Rays v Red Sox game at Tropicana field yesteday. Big Papi went off. But the highlight, or maybe lowlight, of the evening was toward the end of the day as me and the two co-workers I came with were leaving. They're both very talented writers, funny people and all together cool. Vanessa is a national/international reporter, working in the downtown St. Pete office...so although I was very familiar with her great work, I had never personally met her. She was real cool though. Kruse is one of my partners working at my bureau in Hernando. Once again, very cool.

But as we were leaving we spotted a young kat with a Kanye West T-Shirt that read, "Kanye says, "Bust doesn't like black people." A brilliant T-shirt that I'll definitely get my hands on...if they make it in 8X. So me and my left-leaning, witty, precocious co-workers have a good laugh and start discussing Ye's thoughts.

Inevitably, this cartoon ran in a University of Florida newspaper came up. Here's a story on it. And here is a letter to the student newspaper from the UF president.

Before getting to the cartoon. Two things scared. The fact that both of my co-workers thought the cartoon was funny and chuckled as we discussed it. And the fact that when talking about the cartoon they said the word "Nigga" out loud, all the while laughing. Like it's a joke.

I blame Dave Chappelle.

And so does the unapologetic cartoonist. He reasoned that hiphoppers always use the word and people fall out laughing when Chappelle and Charlie Murphy use it, etc.

I've been saying this since the first Chappelle season.. He's really, knowingly or unknowingly, making it seem OK for anyone to use the word.

I don't really have time to get into thjis at the moment. But it's a problem.

You know how Twist gets down, so you know I quickly let me two pals know that what they said wasn't cool and neither was the cartoon.

The cartoon is a whole nother subject.

I mean, everything about it was insensitive. Some questions:

-- Why are Kanye's pants WAY big? Kanye is not Lil Wayne. He wears mostly euro-cut jeans. So why did the cartoonist give him the stereotypical, ghetto-bum, 8-sizes too big jeans?

-- why sis the race card feature a black clown? what's that saying? That everytime a black person injects race into discussions he/she is nothing more than a dimwitted clown? Was Kanye a clown for being honest and voicing a far-reaching sentiment of the black community?

-- Condi is slim. Why does she have those wide hips? Don't get me wrong, I brush my teeth with hips and love the fact that the sistas get it from their mommas. But why give Condi those hips?

The answer is that the cartoonist thinks all these things about black people. He dwells solely in a mental realm where all black women have large hips, all rappers wear too-baggy jeans and black people mostly tend to be clowns.

That cartoon was not smart. That cartoon was not witty. That cartoon was not even provocative. It was foolish and it telling. It told on the cartoonist, told on Chappelle, told on those UF editors , it told on the problems that college and daily newspapers have with diversity (no way a black person would have let that pea-brained cartoon slide), it told on a whole buch of people.

Oh, and by the way, those prik-head UF editors still haven't issued an apology. They probably think all the picketing students are just clowns anyway. "Bros, bros, bros...layoff OK? We watch Chappelle...trust us, it's cool."