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NATIONAL
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N-Word Petition
NNPA
[Rev. Jesse L. Jackson and other national leaders are urging Blacks to sign this petition and send to the FCC]
Resolution In Opposition to the use of the word ''nigger''
Conscious of the age old responsibility of cultural leaders in any part of the world to protect and defend the integrity of the humanity of their members and so to dignify their culture...
Understanding the objective of black leaders who fought to dignify the word ''negro'' with a capital N at the turn of the 20th century and asserting the right to continue the task of rehabilitating aspects of African American culture that provide a positive image of our people in the 21st century....
WE bring to public attention by this Resolution, the continued pain that the word ''nigger'' causes by its theft of the humanity of black people and thereby, the inferiorization of their personality through the recent popularization of this word and the attempts by some to rationalize its use...
WE RESOLVE THAT:
Whereas, the term ''nigger'' was coined by English and Portuguese slave catchers and used for 500 years as place-names in Africa and as the badge of identity of the people they oppressed, to signify that they were less than human;
Whereas in the 21st century that term is still used by race haters as a negative reference to African Americans and continues to cause them shame and hurt as a gross insult to their being and thus, exists as a fighting word causing blacks to defend their integrity, but where the humanity of those who use it is also placed in question....
Whereas recent incidents have found this word: to have been wrongly defined as representing black people, to be used as a racial epithet when a white man beat a black man with a stick in New York City, to be reported by parents as hurtful to children when used by teachers in school, and to be used to vilify patrons in a comic bar...
Whereas we acknowledge the evolution of the intimate use of this term in black speech and cultural conversation, but also note the growth of its use outside the black community through its commercialization in books, articles and in Rap and Hip-Hop musical lyrics and as an object of cross-racial humor....
Whereas we note that the achievement of a people is often enhanced or damaged by their self-image and that this word has the power to denigrate our capability and so to call for less than our best, an outcome we should not transmit to our children as acceptable...
Whereas the intimate use of this term by blacks themselves acts as a license for its popularization elsewhere because the inequality in racial power makes blacks less able to regulate its use as a term of endearment and protect it from becoming a weapon in the further distortion of black humanity...
Whereas WE strongly reject the misguided logic that the repeated use of this term in cross-racial speech and its popularization is a methodology to cause its destructive power to wane and its use to disappear...
THEREFORE, we take this step to rob this word of its power to define, to hurt and to damage our humanity and the humanity of those who use it, by calling upon our community, or nation and the world to stop using the word ''nigger'' in any context, and....
Call upon the Federal Communication Commission to consider this word as ''hate speech'' as offensive to community standards and to monitor its use as vigorously as they have to prevent harmful gender related speech in having access to the airwaves.
Call upon all people to show the same respect to African American culture that they have for other cultures in America by fighting to remove harmful terms of identity from musical lyrics, from movies and television, and by preventing commercialization in other venues of popular usage...
CONCLUDE that the act of calling for measures that uplift the human personality of African Americans as a democratic project that is related to our long quest for equality, and since there is no real freedom and equality without dignity, we call upon Americans and all people of good will to join us in this struggle to produce the best in the relations among groups and individuals of different races....
To this resolution we affix our names as an indication of our pledge of support to this cause.
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