Does this suit and glasses make me look smart? Well PREPARE TO BE DAZZLED.
Professional extrovert Kanye West took to the Twitter airwaves last night, posing the age old question to his gazillion possibly somewhat literate followers (they ARE reading and typing almost a full 140 characters at a time, after all): is using the words ‘bitch’ or ‘nigga’ relative to another human being ever really okay?
He’s a freakin’ philosopher, this guy.
But because context is obviously key here ON. SO. MANY. LEVELS., let’s start off things by reading Kanye’s twitter-riff in its glorious, paragraph-ized entirety, before we jump to conclusions, m’kay?:
I usually never tweet questions but I struggle with this so here goes… Is the word BITCH acceptable? To be more specific, is it acceptable for a man to call a woman a bitch even if it’s endearing? Even typing it in question form it’s still feels harsh? Has hip hop conditioned us to accept this word? Do we love this word as much as we love the word NIGGA in an endearing way? correction, Here’s the age old question, would we refer to our mothers as bitches? Would’ we call our fathers niggers or better yet NIGGAS? If nigga is such a positive word, why do we feel so uncomfortable for white people to say it, even with a hall pass? Is it ok to use bitch as long as we put BAD in front of it? Like you a BAD BITCH. Perhaps the words BITCH and NIGGA are now neither positive or negative. They are just potent and it depends on how the are used and by whom? #FREETHOUGHT.
The hashtag at the end there just slays me. It’s as if he honestly believes he’s gotten at some heretofore unascertained nugget of pure, golden wisdom about the relationship between language, context, and signification, LIKE A BOSS. #WOAH #DEEPNESS
Kanye’s Twitterrant of course comes on the heels of heat he received for his aural ode to girlfriend and fellow attention whore Kim Kardashian, lovingly entitled “Perfect Bitch.” I know, ladies, I KNOW. You’re all practically swooning right now, aren’t you? TRY TO CONTROL YOURSELVES, BITCHES (oooh see what I did there?). #BUTIMEANITINANENDEARINGWAY #DAMMIT
So like most psuedo-philosophical queries lazily crowd-sourced to Twitter, the answer here seems obvious: that it’s all about context. That the relative okay-ness or not-okay-ness of one’s use of such potentially demeaning language really depends on who is saying it to whom, and what the relationship and power balance is between them.
OR IS IT?
What say you, fellow internet denizens? When are these words acceptable to use? Or are they simply not acceptable to use at all? Do you use them, and if so how/why/when? #LEAVEACOMMENTYO #DON’TFORGETTHEHASHTAG
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About Tracey Gaughran-Perez
