When will Micheal Richards stop apologizing?

Heineken Helen

cutback wrote:

WOW. That was a dumb thing to do. Next time you're in LA let me know. You don't need to go to south central to have a good time.

Thanks it wasn't intentional and if we knew where we were going, we probably may not have gone. We'd been drinking in the same bar every night but it closed at 2am. There was a black guy we'd been chatting to most nights so when we asked the barman where we could go that was open later, he said to ask him. So we did, he said he was going to a club and we were more than welcome to join him... didn't say we may not be welcome there at all. AND as soon as we got into the club, he fucked off and left us, two girls on our own to deal with this. Thankfully, we DID meet some really cool people who were looking out for us until we got a taxi. One guy even offered to hotwire a car and drive us back to the hotel it was tempting if we'd been there for much longer . It was mainly the women who had a problem with us I think, none of the men said or did anything and were pretty helpful and were genuinely trying to find a way for us to get away.

We drank in a black pub in New York one night and it was the best craic we had over there. Instead of standing out being a bad thing, everyone wanted to talk to us . Probably helped that the cousin I was with that time used to be Miss Dublin

Ahnimus

Heineken Helen wrote:

...it wasn't intentional and if we knew where we were going, we probably may not have gone...

Yup, and if Michael Richards knew where he was going, he wouldn't have either.

Heineken Helen

Ahnimus wrote:

Yup, and if Michael Richards knew where he was going, he wouldn't have either.

Oh come on, I'm no Michael Richards

evenkat

Heineken Helen wrote:

Thanks it wasn't intentional and if we knew where we were going, we probably may not have gone. We'd been drinking in the same bar every night but it closed at 2am. There was a black guy we'd been chatting to most nights so when we asked the barman where we could go that was open later, he said to ask him. So we did, he said he was going to a club and we were more than welcome to join him... didn't say we may not be welcome there at all. AND as soon as we got into the club, he fucked off and left us, two girls on our own to deal with this. Thankfully, we DID meet some really cool people who were looking out for us until we got a taxi. One guy even offered to hotwire a car and drive us back to the hotel it was tempting if we'd been there for much longer . It was mainly the women who had a problem with us I think, none of the men said or did anything and were pretty helpful and were genuinely trying to find a way for us to get away.

We drank in a black pub in New York one night and it was the best craic we had over there. Instead of standing out being a bad thing, everyone wanted to talk to us . Probably helped that the cousin I was with that time used to be Miss Dublin

You 'probably' may not have gone? :eek:

evenkat

Heineken Helen wrote:

No, we consider seinfeld to be a typical american sense of humour... i.e. not funny at all

Ummm...hello . I actually didn't think it was funny at first either. It took a while to grow on me. Friends made me laugh my ass off right from the first episode until the last one. I loved that show.

Ahnimus

Heineken Helen wrote:

Oh come on, I'm no Michael Richards

Certainly not

I'm just saying that if we all know where we are going, we might not go.

The reason Michael Richards is apologizing is because he knows where he went, but didn't know he was going there before he went there.

Heineken Helen

evenkat wrote:

You 'probably' may not have gone? :eek:

well ok if he had explained that we were going to a place where people were going to pick fights with us straight away and that there's no way we'd even manage to get a DRINK :eek: what would be the point. But I think if he had said he was bringing us to the hood and maybe if he had a few friends or something, I wouldn't be the kinda person to think 'oh fuck, I'm going to the hood, no way'... although I would now

Friends WAS great and I was only joking

Well ahnimus, it's a good story to have though, isn't it? Didn't feel like it at the time but it's not really that big of a deal I suppose. It's like when tourists say they want to go to Belfast (and they say it in a 'see I'm fearless' kinda way) and I think 'so what? We've all been there'

Ahnimus

Heineken Helen wrote:

Well ahnimus, it's a good story to have though, isn't it? Didn't feel like it at the time but it's not really that big of a deal I suppose. It's like when tourists say they want to go to Belfast (and they say it in a 'see I'm fearless' kinda way) and I think 'so what? We've all been there'

Hehe, I totally agree, see the thread "Free-Will" for more of what I mean

Collin

It does the job of marking the ascendancy of black Americans
By JOHN RIDLEY

Time
Posted Sunday, Dec. 3, 2006

Nigger.
Take a real good gander at it. Two syllables. Six letters. And give it a goodbye. 'Cause right now nigger's on a linguistic hit list. If the verbal totalitarians have their way, they will take a blowtorch to the word, light it up and not stop burning until even the embers and ash aren't fit to be returned to the earth.
But what would we really be destroying? There is no other word in our culture that incites, infuriates, confounds and informs as does the word nigger. Who uses it, how it's used, which washed-up actor turned comic (think Michael Richards) shoulda stayed the hell clear of the word--they all help mark the ascension of black America through the cultural landscape. In art and letters and theater and comedy, this one word, this mangle of Latin and French and Spanish, has been description and slur and salutation, and in each incarnation a curio of our society.
No matter the classic book The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is set in an antebellum age; the plight of runaway slave Nigger Jim is given equal consideration as that of his young white friend. Through Nigger Jim, the concept of racial parity, the examination of the system of slavery were forced upon Southern segregationists.
Should we also toss on the fire Dick Gregory's autobiography, written for cross-consumption as a harsh accounting of the racial indignities heaped upon a young black as he travels from boy to man? The book's ultimate satirical trick was to flip the slur into a sales tool. Its title: Nigger! "Whenever you hear the word 'nigger,'" Gregory wrote in the introduction, "you'll know they're advertising my book." Call a man a nigger, earn a brother a dollar.
Jump to Hollywood's blaxploitation era in the 1960s, when blacks suddenly were allowed to make movies told from our point of view. Melvin Van Peebles' 1971 Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song--an ode to a wronged black man on the run from the cops--introduced the lead character as a "baadasssss nigger coming back to collect some dues!" And that "nigger" in the film, as Van Peebles tells it, snapped the streak of "liberal, sort of nice movies where we always ended up dead at the end."
In 1984's A Soldier's Story, a black military officer is investigating the murder of an unpopular black soldier near an Army base in Louisiana. Sergeant Waters, the victim, brutally compels a young black private to give up his country ways and "quit thinking like a nigger." It was a rarely seen public representation of our private interactions: the impatience some blacks have with a victim mentality. Shocking. Powerful. A message to a white populace that we are not lemmings. And that even among ourselves, we're not a single tribe.
Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy and Chris Rock have all traded on demystifying nigger. And in doing so, they have advanced the racial debate further than a thousand roundtable discussions populated with the best Ivy League minds. Pryor and Chevy Chase's Saturday Night Live "word association" sketch was a prime example of comedy's power to explore racial interplay in the workplace, the constant questioning of blacks as to when a comment is harmless and when is it racist. Chase is the white human-resources executive. Pryor, the black job applicant. What begins with Chase: "White," Pryor: "Black," devolves through Chase: "Negro," Pryor: "Whitey," Chase: "Colored," Pryor: "Redneck," Chase: "Jungle bunny," Pryor: "Honky!" Chase: "Nigger," Pryor: "Dead honky!"
1976. Silver Streak, Pryor and Gene Wilder's comedic take on The Defiant Ones. In the penultimate moment, Pryor's character, camouflaged as a lowly train porter, flips a gat on the uppity white villain, demanding to know, in a brilliant combination of anger and comic timing, "Who you callin' nigger?" Yeah. That was all of us. That was all of black America wanting to know from any race baiter as we moved through the Establishment: Excuse me, who exactly are you calling nigger?
And a couple of mollycoddles out there want to put the kibosh on that? Line 'em up, man. Line up pop culture from The Nigger of the Narcissus to The Birth of a Nation to To Kill a Mockingbird, right on through N.W.A. and "Niggas vs. Black People," and on to comedian Dave Chappelle playing a blind Ku Klux Klan member who ends up yelling "nigger" at himself.
In an era of enlightenment and free communication, do we really want to wipe out the work of the satirists who shove and cajole, who take language and thought by the throat and force us to confront with wit and guile what most refuse to face? We need this word. Relax. Take a deep breath. It's gonna be cool. Two syllables. Six letters. It's not the word, only the fear that needs to be put aside.

John Ridley is a commentator and author of The American Way, a graphic-novel series to be published in February

Ahnimus

My sediments exactly Collin

Collin

Ahnimus wrote:

My sediments exactly Collin

I thought it was an interesting read and since I have now access to the Time archive, I thought I'd give it a go.

Ahnimus

Collin wrote:

I thought it was an interesting read and since I have now access to the Time archive, I thought I'd give it a go.

That Chase-Pryor skit is a classic

Collin

Ahnimus wrote:

That Chase-Pryor skit is a classic

Indeed it is, I just knew the author would mention it.

seanw1010

doesnt jackson cheat on his wife?

rebornFixer

Collin wrote:

It does the job of marking the ascendancy of black Americans
By JOHN RIDLEY

Time
Posted Sunday, Dec. 3, 2006

Nigger.
Take a real good gander at it. Two syllables. Six letters. And give it a goodbye. 'Cause right now nigger's on a linguistic hit list. If the verbal totalitarians have their way, they will take a blowtorch to the word, light it up and not stop burning until even the embers and ash aren't fit to be returned to the earth.
But what would we really be destroying? There is no other word in our culture that incites, infuriates, confounds and informs as does the word nigger. Who uses it, how it's used, which washed-up actor turned comic (think Michael Richards) shoulda stayed the hell clear of the word--they all help mark the ascension of black America through the cultural landscape. In art and letters and theater and comedy, this one word, this mangle of Latin and French and Spanish, has been description and slur and salutation, and in each incarnation a curio of our society.
No matter the classic book The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is set in an antebellum age; the plight of runaway slave Nigger Jim is given equal consideration as that of his young white friend. Through Nigger Jim, the concept of racial parity, the examination of the system of slavery were forced upon Southern segregationists.
Should we also toss on the fire Dick Gregory's autobiography, written for cross-consumption as a harsh accounting of the racial indignities heaped upon a young black as he travels from boy to man? The book's ultimate satirical trick was to flip the slur into a sales tool. Its title: Nigger! "Whenever you hear the word 'nigger,'" Gregory wrote in the introduction, "you'll know they're advertising my book." Call a man a nigger, earn a brother a dollar.
Jump to Hollywood's blaxploitation era in the 1960s, when blacks suddenly were allowed to make movies told from our point of view. Melvin Van Peebles' 1971 Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song--an ode to a wronged black man on the run from the cops--introduced the lead character as a "baadasssss nigger coming back to collect some dues!" And that "nigger" in the film, as Van Peebles tells it, snapped the streak of "liberal, sort of nice movies where we always ended up dead at the end."
In 1984's A Soldier's Story, a black military officer is investigating the murder of an unpopular black soldier near an Army base in Louisiana. Sergeant Waters, the victim, brutally compels a young black private to give up his country ways and "quit thinking like a nigger." It was a rarely seen public representation of our private interactions: the impatience some blacks have with a victim mentality. Shocking. Powerful. A message to a white populace that we are not lemmings. And that even among ourselves, we're not a single tribe.
Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy and Chris Rock have all traded on demystifying nigger. And in doing so, they have advanced the racial debate further than a thousand roundtable discussions populated with the best Ivy League minds. Pryor and Chevy Chase's Saturday Night Live "word association" sketch was a prime example of comedy's power to explore racial interplay in the workplace, the constant questioning of blacks as to when a comment is harmless and when is it racist. Chase is the white human-resources executive. Pryor, the black job applicant. What begins with Chase: "White," Pryor: "Black," devolves through Chase: "Negro," Pryor: "Whitey," Chase: "Colored," Pryor: "Redneck," Chase: "Jungle bunny," Pryor: "Honky!" Chase: "Nigger," Pryor: "Dead honky!"
1976. Silver Streak, Pryor and Gene Wilder's comedic take on The Defiant Ones. In the penultimate moment, Pryor's character, camouflaged as a lowly train porter, flips a gat on the uppity white villain, demanding to know, in a brilliant combination of anger and comic timing, "Who you callin' nigger?" Yeah. That was all of us. That was all of black America wanting to know from any race baiter as we moved through the Establishment: Excuse me, who exactly are you calling nigger?
And a couple of mollycoddles out there want to put the kibosh on that? Line 'em up, man. Line up pop culture from The Nigger of the Narcissus to The Birth of a Nation to To Kill a Mockingbird, right on through N.W.A. and "Niggas vs. Black People," and on to comedian Dave Chappelle playing a blind Ku Klux Klan member who ends up yelling "nigger" at himself.
In an era of enlightenment and free communication, do we really want to wipe out the work of the satirists who shove and cajole, who take language and thought by the throat and force us to confront with wit and guile what most refuse to face? We need this word. Relax. Take a deep breath. It's gonna be cool. Two syllables. Six letters. It's not the word, only the fear that needs to be put aside.

John Ridley is a commentator and author of The American Way, a graphic-novel series to be published in February

That was a very good read.

rarghrargh-brownstar

damn

too much unfair pressure against all of you whiteys.
fight the power as usual reborn.

:rolleyes:

edit: this came out weird on paper.....but yeah, lots of peeps do need to apologize too. yup.

rebornFixer

rarghrargh-brownstar wrote:

damn

too much unfair pressure against all of you whiteys.
fight the power as usual reborn.

:rolleyes:

edit: this came out weird on paper.....but yeah, lots of peeps do need to apologize too. yup.

Hey, if this man's apologetic crusade makes you all hot and bothered, power to ya. Call me crazy for thinking once or twice is good enough.

mookie9999

VictoryGin wrote:

i don't know anyone who is scared of harlem at night. especially my friends who live there. have you been lately?

Let me guess. Your friends live in the low, low 100's? Perhaps, even 98th st on the east side?!?!?

Collin

mookie9999 wrote:

Let me guess. Your friends live in the low, low 100's? Perhaps, even 98th st on the east side?!?!?

Where is it more dangerous? 130+ ?

mookie9999

Collin wrote:

Where is it more dangerous? 130+ ?

Look out I'm about to use the "g" word. But with the continuing escalated prices of Manhattan real estate, rich white people finally figured out if you just go up a few blocks and start buying brownstones and townhouses you can force the low-middle income folks out (gentrification anyone?) and up. Then you have these young first time homebuyers attempting to draw attention to themselves by constantly talking about how they "live in Harlem". Harlem may be "safer" now because the low income residents have been forced up and out. For increased crime you need to look no further than the Bronx and certain parts of Brooklyn and Queens where people who are forever down on their luck (minorities/immigrants) try to live the only way they know how. (Sorry, I couldn't refrain from using a line from the Dukes of Hazzard theme song, after all what would a discussion about race be without an orange car with a confederate flag on top?)