KKKramer

There's been a lot of hoopla over Michael Richards (Kramer from Seinfeld)flipping out onstage, going haywire on two black audience members who were heckling him. After watching the footage, I had to shake my head. I understand how comedians are supposed to push the boundaries, but if a white comedian (or any artist) says the word "nigger," he or she should do so in a valid, or thought provoking manner. Not in a blatant racist way as Richards did. Lenny Bruce (a controversial Jewish comedian RIP) famously used this word in his comeday act. But he did it as social commentary. His argument was that it is just a word. He said that if people wouldn't get so upset at being called a "nigger'kike/wop/faggot/chink/etc" and if these words got used more, then the negative power of these words word diminish. This argument got adopted by the black community, where one black person can call another black person a "nigger/nigga." Essentially, they take this negative word and reappropriate it as a word of empowerment. I guess cops in San Francisco in the 1960s got fed up with getting called pigs by political activists, so they decided to call themselves pigs. Patti Smith had a contoversial song called "Rock n Roll Nigger." Her usage of the word went beyond the one meaning of a black slave. She used the term as anyone who got outcast by society. So for her, she included everyone from Jesus to John Lennon to Jackson Pollock. For her, a "nigger" was anyone who was "outside of society" and she wanted to be a "nigger." So Bruce and Smith successively pulled off using the word "nigger." Michael Richards, on the other hand, came across as being a blatant racist on par with Mel Gibson's anti-semitic outburst a few months ago. Watching the footage of Richards in the night club was almost painful. I find it hard to fathom in today's age that people still have these deep ingrained prejudices inside them.