He said Nigger!!!!

In response to Johnny M's post found below: There is an Indo-Canadian at my work who will refer to himself or 'his people' as brown. He says, "...oh, that's funny, cause we brown people do (this or that)..." and if I'm to say to him, 'brown people,' (and I have), he doesn't say anything. Like, I mean, in the spooky silent disconcerting sort of way. It's like he's allowed to say brown but I'm not. Similarly, African-Americans can run around calling themselves niggers, or like, Canadian First-Nations peoples call themselves Indians. This is what frustrates me, cause when you hang out with someone long enough, you start to talk like them, or at least inherit some of their sayings. When I hung out with these Aussie guys for a few days, I found myself starting to say 'mate', or 'petrol' instead of gas, or things like that. Now thats ok, cause they don't really mind, (not like the English girl I met yesterday...). But if I hang out with an African American who calls himself a nigger, and eventually one day I call him nigger, I'll feel really bad! As a friend he may not even care, but I will. Especially if there are other 'niggers' around, you know? And here's my point. I would love to see racism dissappear as much as the next guy, but I think the most important thing is to start with ourselves. If I look at myself and see a skinny white boy, I'm going to look at other people as 'NOT skinny white boy', and that is the starting point for racism. Niggers, brownies, mennonites, we all do it. We all separate ourselves from the others by labelling our own groups in seemingly derogatory ways. I think maybe this is the key to understanding racism, and the key to helping minimize it.