Posted on 5 July 2015

If you aren’t regularly reading Ta-Nehisi Coates, you are missing out on the opportunity to read one of the great thinkers of our time. He tweeted out this older piece today, and it is a brilliant take on the “if black people can say n*****, why can’t I?” argument:

“I have never called my father Billy. I understand, like most people, that words take on meaning within a context. It might be true that you refer to your spouse as Baby. But were I to take this as license to do the same, you would most likely protest. Right names depend on right relationships, a fact so basic to human speech that without it, human language might well collapse. But as with so much of what we take as human, we seem to be in need of an African-American exception.”

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