I think that's a perfectly reasonable stance to have (believing nobody should use it), and I agree that it'd probably be more helpful if everyone just stopped using the word altogether.
But at the same time, when black people explain why they still use the word I understand just fine, and I don't think it's particularly hard to understand why people still choose to use the word. I don't think it's the choice that I would make if I was black, but then again I have no idea how I'd feel if I was black so it's hard to say.
I also don't get even the slightest feeling of unfairness over the fact that people would not be comfortable with me using it.
I'm sure you've heard this explained before. I think some people actively choose not to understand, because they don't personally agree. You can disagree with something, and still understand the people with whom you disagree.
It all comes down to money and the demand of a white audience to hear the word said by black guys pretending to be hardened criminals. It is no secret that rap and thug culture is a creation of the entertainment industry catering to the demand of black violence by white audiences.
Excellent article featured in The New Republic written in 1991 breaking down the white demand for rap music:
"...the history of rap's degeneration from insurgent black street music to mainstream pop points to another dispiriting conclusion: the more rappers were packaged as violent black criminals, the bigger their white audiences became."
@Ruprecht I apologize if the N-Word got through. I read through the parts of the article I posted multiple times to make sure I edited the word out, but I may have missed it once or twice.
The Rap on Rap
The 'black music' that isn't either.
So it was that America awoke on June 22, 1991, to find that its favorite record was not
Out of Time, by aging college-boy rockers R.E.M., but
N***4life, a musical celebration of gang rape and other violence by N.W.A., or N*** With Attitude, a rap group from the Los Angeles ghetto of Compton whose records had never before risen above No. 27 on the Billboard charts.
From
N***4life to
Boyz N the Hood,
young black men committing acts of violence were available this summer in a wide variety of entertainment formats. Of these none is more popular than rap. And none has received quite the level of critical attention and concern. Writers on the left have long viewed rap as the heartbeat of urban America, its authors, in Arthur Kempton's words, "the pre-eminent young dramaturgists in the clamorous theater of the street." On the right, this assumption has been shared, but greeted with predictable disdain.
Neither side of the debate has been prepared, however, to confront what the entertainment industry's receipts from this summer prove beyond doubt: although rap is still proportionally more popular among blacks,
its primary audience is white and lives in the suburbs. And the history of rap's degeneration from insurgent black street music to mainstream pop points to another dispiriting conclusion: the more rappers were packaged as violent black criminals, the bigger their white audiences became.
Rap's new mass audience was in large part the brainchild of Rick Rubin, a Jewish punk rocker from suburban Long Island who produced the music behind many of rap's biggest acts....
With rap, however, this process took an unexpected turn:
white demand indeed began to determine the direction of the genre, but what it wanted was music more defiantly black. The result was Public Enemy, produced and marketed by Rubin, the next group significantly to broaden rap's appeal to young whites.
The ways in which rap has been consumed and popularized speak not of cross-cultural understanding, musical or otherwise, but of a voyeurism and tolerance of racism in which black and white are both complicit.
"Both the rappers and their white fans affect and commodify their own visions of street culture," argues Henry Louis Gates Jr. of Harvard University, "like buying Navajo blankets at a reservation road-stop.
A lot of what you see in rap is the guilt of the black middle class about its economic success, its inability to put forth a culture of its own. Instead they do the worst possible thing, falling back on fantasies of street life. In turn,
white college students with impeccable gender credentials buy nasty sex lyrics under the cover of getting at some kind of authentic black experience."
Gates goes on to make the more worrying point:
"What is potentially very dangerous about this is the feeling that by buying records they have made some kind of valid social commitment."
https://newrepublic.com/article/120894/david-samuels-rap-rap-1991
The man who played a large role in popularizing rap, Rick Rubin:
