Written By : Duane Lester

We live in two different worlds, folks. Blacks folks live in one world and white folks live in the other.

That’s not my perspective. Take Whoopi Goldberg’s word for it:

Joy Behar thinks that when they called for a boycott of the N-bomb, they were calling for a boycott of its public use. Saying it in private, that’s fine. Some boycott.

Sherri Shepard says she can use it as “a term of endearment.” White people, she doesn’t “want to hear it come out of your mouth.” Well, I don’t want to hear it coming out of anyone’s mouth.

Hasselback goes on to say, “We [blacks and whites] don’t live in different worlds, we live in the same world.”

Not according to Whoopi: “We don’t live in the same world. What I need you to understand is the frustration that goes along with when you say we live in the same world. It isn’t balanced.”

Whoopi insists that we live in different worlds, and that it is bad, but then insists that she can use a term that whites can’t. How is that helping anything? How is that helping to eliminate her perspective that we live in different worlds? Someone explain to me how, if we are to be equal, that we can have different standards for what is appropriate based on race, because I don’t get it.

It takes me back to working with inner city kids and they would try to convince me that if it ended with an “a” rather than an “er,” then it was fine.

Um, no. It’s racist. We are continuing to allow ourselves as Americans to be divided and this term is the wedge that is helping to divide us. It is an ugly racist term that has no place in civil discussions, regardless of what it ends with and regardless of skin tone.

Rather than celebrating the fact that, as Sheppard said, you took the term back and using it as a “term of endearment,” how about we just let it die and stop allowing it push us apart?

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