Imustupidredneck
C April 17, 2007

WARNING: The following article may offend.

Actually, I'm not sure who it might offend or why. That's sort of why I'm writing.

By now, everybody knows that Don Imus, a radio DJ I never thought was funny anyway, has been fired amid widespread outrage at his racially-charged comments about the Rutgers women's basketball team.

The phrase he used was "nappy-headed ho's"

"Ho" aside, it was the adjective "nappy" that seems to have attracted all the attention. A word which never appeared on George Carlin's list of words you can't say on television. A word far unlike the n-word I was taught not to say. In fact, a word I had never heard of before people started being offended by it.

After several days of trying to figure out why this is an insult, I realized the only way to get an answer was to be sincerely ask two of the ladies I work with.

"What does "nappy-headed" actually mean?"

"It's a word that should never come out of your mouth again."

"But what does it mean?"

"It's something you shouldn't say."

"But what does it mean?"

I don't like Major George. To be perfectly honest, I don't like most officers, but her rabid political-correctness only frustrated me more. Sgt. 1st Class Williams, who was with her, seemed mildly amused by the exchange and told Major George to educate me, but she didn't say anything about it herself.

I finally got her to say it was a racial slur in reference to the way little black girls used to wear their hair. Which I could have figured out for myself.

What I didn't ask, and what I have since tried to figure out, is why "nappy" ever became offensive. In high school, I used to refer to a friend of mine as "dandelion-head," which is the closest I can imagine to an offensive hair adjective, though the insult seemed lost on him. "Nappy," I imagine, would relate to the "nape" of a persons neck, though I have difficulty imagining the style. I have this difficultly because no one will talk about it.

I can even understand the necessity of inventing the word, and I can kind of see how it came to be racially charged. Somewhere in time, a white bigot heard the word used and began repeating it with such a distasteful inflection that it entirely overrode the original meaning. The inflection poisoned the word.

Kind of like the way Ann Coulter uses the word "liberal." Or the way ignorant tourists shortened the word "Nigerian." Or the Roman goddess "Cunina."

Do I have a point, other than that words themselves are neither good nor bad, but it is the intention behind them that counts? You already knew that, so I'm not going to repeat it.

Don Imus might have known that "nappy" was like another n-word to millions of black females, or he might have thought it was a cute way to describe their hair. In either case, I think it's important to try to understand his intentions before arbitrarily deciding he should be fired (in any case, I think a two-week suspension is warranted).

But I don't think Imus is the worst person here. Rather, I think Sharpton and everyone else that jumped on him, far from cleaning up our language, is only serving to create another dirty-word for millions like me who may have never heard the word before.

Locking these words away and making them forbidden only lends them power, and getting offended about everything that happens only serves to bring us away from the color-blind society we aught to strive for.