Talib Kweli's Page

I wanted to share some of my brother Jamal Greene's comments on Dr. Laura. Here is audio of how she handled a caller to her radio show

http://www.rightcelebrity.com/?p=9794

Here was some of what my brother said when my mother asked us what we thought about it.

"The N word is more of an issue of dialect than race, although of course the two are difficult to disaggregate. The word simply has a different meaning in standard english than it does in black english. and so it makes sense that it may be appropriate to invoke it when speaking one vernacular but not the other. It's invocation by Dr Laura was not by and of black culture, but in a formal sense she used it at a distance, in the same way a linguist or an academic would do so. I have no problem, per se, with the word being used in this way, but then it's used is subject to the same criticisms that academics subject themselves: that is intellectual coherence, analytic rigor, etc. Dr Laura is so self evidently not intellectually coherent or analytically rigorous that her "academic" discussion of the word comes off as insensitive and therefore offensive. In short, the problem for me isn't that she used the word, it's that she doesn't know what she's talking about."