UK BAFTA furore! ‘N-word’…

It is baffling why people allow utterance of a word or words to be so powerful that those who utter those words do so, with the assumption or knowledge that uttering such words will achieve maximum hurt!

You don’t defeat a bully by rolling over and crying!

Yes, it is understandable that Delroy Lindo and Michael B Jordan didn’t dress up in nice suits and head to the UK BAFTA event expecting to be called Ni**ers! BUT, neither do the everyday black folk on the streets…

People need to stop reacting so much to these situations! Yes, it is abhorrent. Yes, it should not be happening. BUT, it ain’t gonna end, if the people who utter these awful words believe they can use them to achieve the hurt they aim to achieve!

Now, in the specific case of the weeks’ BAFTA incident, the guy who uttered the N-word suffer from a condition called Tourette Syndrome. As such, it is a very simple open & shut case. He had no intention to cause offence.
Now, did he yell anything out to any other group of people? I’m not sure. Could the entire situation have been avoided? Yes. There is no doubt the organisers of the event could have preempted this for Delroy & Michael’s sake. Unless of course, it is claimed that this is the first time the fellow has ever uttered the N-word…

The reaction to these slurs are a little strange in my humble opinion. Afterall,according to the Pew Research Centre Survey, 57% of black adults in the US are thought to descend from slaves. So, to assume the N-word can just be blasted out there, is daft anyway. Besides, African-American history is not the entirety of black history. There are African countries that were never colonised for instance (I know of at least 1). And it was not every black person or African was enslaved during the transatlantic slave trade years. Last week was a football who claimed he was called a monkey. Awful experience I’m sure, and I do not seek to water it down nor normalise it, BUT, all humans have features that resemble those of monkeys. Black folk need to stop getting riled by these daft utterances and attempts at belittling them.

In America, they need to move on and move forward. As Morgan Freeman said for years: end the colour description. If not, get the colours right. What colour is a Japanese? What colour are Chinese? Koreans? Surely, the entire world won’t just fit into black, white or brown?
I am sure it is deeply hurtful to people who get singled out for insult because of their race, but the only way to end it, is to stand up to the bully and show them their words are now meaningless and cannot hurt you and are effectively just words. Stop reacting to it. Take the power away from the bully.