A lot of folks have been talking a lot about a certain NFL player's use of the N-word. I don't have much to add to this story, beyond a simple anecdote. Various media celebrities have aired their thoughts on this but what I find most amusing is the suggestion that because we hear it so often in rap music and popular culture, us white folks can't be blamed for using it ourselves.

Uh...bullshit?

I am a big karaoke nerd. I can't seem to get enough of embarassing the hell out of myself in front of other folks. As you may also guess, lots of rap songs are really popular at karaoke. And yet, somehow, despite hearing truckloads of folks (of all kinds of skin colors) do rap songs at karaoke, often where the teleprompter itself says something like "n***a", I have yet to ever hear even one "rapper" use the n-word.

One (white) karaoke buddy I have in particular is brilliant at this. He loves rapping, and he's really good at it -- often he even speeds up the tracks as a challenge to see how quickly he can go. And he's a genius at substituting on the fly, subbing in words like "brother" when the teleprompter is telling him to say "n***er" and he's rapping at 1000 miles per hour.

Here's a guy who loves rap; his ipod is probably 60% rap. He probably hears the n-word about a hundred times a day (conservatively). And yet, somehow, through all of that, he's managed to avoid getting in to the habit of saying it himself. Somehow, he's never sat and said to himself "Wow, all these rappers I love are saying it all the time. It probably won't be that bad if I say it too, right?"

Because it's just not that hard to excise that word from your vocabulary. It's basically the same skill set as "not saying the F-word in front of your grandmother", just applied all the time. Some things are socially acceptable, and some are not. You might make an argument that you think this is unjust (and most of us will call you an idiot for it), but anyone that makes an argument that they didn't know that it was socially unacceptable because of its widespread use in hip-hop is just frankly full of it. No one is really that stupid.