Disclaimer: Ordinarily, whenever a word as offensive to many as this one is used in a story, it gets redacted, replaced. But this story is about the very use of the word in a headline. We beg your indulgence as we report the facts, understanding the sensitivities that many have toward the term.
The WestView News, a paper in New York that calls itself “The Voice of the West Village” has run an article called:
The Nigger in the White House
The article was written by James Lincoln Collier, and it is an anti-racism piece. Collier is an Obama supporter.
Regardless of the intent of the writer and his editor, press everywhere has been calling for Collier’s head on a platter.
It is never okay to use the n-word in a headline. It doesn’t matter if the article is pro or anti-Obama. It is disrespectful to the President Of The United States as a man and disrespectful to the office that he has been elected twice to hold. It was not in any way an appropriate headline. In fact, it is headlines such as this that give the people who hate Obama because of the color of his skin something to point to when they get called out for their bigotry.
The paper’s publisher, George Capsis, defends the headline, saying, “In this article, however, Jim [collier] reminded me that The New York Times avoids using the word, which convinced me that WestView should. He wanted to use the word to shock us into accepting that there are people who believe and use this outrageous word,”
The paper has a distribution of 20,000.
In this 140 character world, where print media is dying a slow death, don't tell me calling the President a nigger in a headline has merit.
— Rusty Redenbacher (@rustymk2) July 6, 2014
Directly below that story ran another, penned by an African-American columnist, entitled “The Headline Offends Me.”
“The decision to use the headline feels misguided to me,” Alvin Hall writes. “I don’t see how its use benefits anyone, but I do feel all too clearly how it deeply offends me.”
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