Originally Posted by AdumbGuy
Alright, I'll take a crack at this. Not a perfect analogy, but let's see if this gets everybody a slightly different perspective.
Scenario 1: Walk up to somebody and start a sentence with, "hey, shithead!" Probable outcome: Fight, dirty looks, etc.
Scenario 2: Walk up to a sibling/close friend and start a sentence with, "hey, shithead!" Probable outcome: Light hearted joking/bonding
Scenario 3: Walk up to random siblings/friends that just called each other shitheads and call one of them a shithead: Fight, dirty looks, etc. and it's probably started by the one you DIDN'T call a shithead.
One's a harmless gradeschool insult and the other's a racist slur, but both work in essentially the same way in that they can be adopted. The difference is that calling somebody a shithead is a generic insult, calling somebody a n***** evokes a long sordid history of brutality and oppression. It's like making a dead baby joke to a woman that just had a miscarriage. Sure you can make it, but don't be surprised if it brings out a shit ton of emotion.
Another thing I want to point out is the very natural human reaction you'll see throughout this thread. The idea that it's unfair, that it's hypocritical for black people to be able to call white people a name with no repercussions. That it's unfair that a black entertainment channel is fine, but a white entertainment channel would cause public outrcy. I never did anything to black people, so why can black people do something that I, a white person, can't do. Congratulations, you have just experienced a small sliver of what it's like to be a black person. Except the things a black person can't do in the same way as a white person can are significantly more problematic. One of my good friends from college - a goofy looking 160lb. six figure earning lawyer in pittsburgh told me about some woman at the grocery store not only pulling her purse tighter, but moving her cart obviously in between her and him. Or my friend from Cameroon finishing up his grad school work leaving a fancy restaurant late at night, waiting 20 minutes while every cab passed him by until he finally gave in, came back in to get our blonde friend that he always had to enlist, and then promptly caught a cab to go home. And the coup de grace - Levar freakin Reading Rainbow Burton has a routine just to ensure he doesn't accidentally get shot by police because he gets pulled over so often.
I don't think Cooper is a racist simply because in my experience, most real racists generally have only minimal or strictly professional contact with other races. But he did do something incredibly stupid. He used a word that essentially encapsulates for black people all of that frustration and all of that anger in all of that time of not being able to do the same things everybody can else can do.
I like what whitlock wrote. He is a contrarian and this is the perfect time to be a contrarian. Cooper did an incredibly stupid thing, but he should be forgiven, most certainly. But that might take some time. In the meantime, to insist that Black people "just deal with it" would be as ridiculous as everybody in this thread that displayed the normal human reaction of disliking hypocrisy, being told to just shut up and deal with it themselves. All we would do is stoke further pointless division.
We need to come together, and all together hate Peyton Manning and the ****ing Broncos.
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