I Want You to Shut the F#ck Up (14 page)

When Michael Vick got a $100 million contract, some commentator on MSNBC said that if Vick was white, he never would have gone through what he had. Well, he probably also wouldn’t have been that good of an athlete, either.

As I write this, I’m working on a radio show. I headed to United Stations to do a mock episode that we could then shop around. We were taking calls, and after a while we got very tired. I asked the program director who set everything up if we had enough material.

“Oh, we’ve got
more
than enough,” he told me. “But we’ve got six more calls so let’s use them, because we paid for them.”

“So even though we don’t need them,” I asked him, “you want to use them?”

Pop quiz! Was this program director:

“That’s the most Jewish thing I’ve ever heard,” I told him.

And he laughed. Of course he laughed, because my comment made sense. If he had been British and I’d said, “That’s the most British thing I’ve ever heard,” he’d just get confused. (Actually, if
he were British he would have never made such a Jewish comment, but that’s beside the point.)

Another example: Once I had neighbors who were two men who lived together. We’ve all had neighbors who are horrible, who make you wince because every time you interact with them they annoy the shit out of you. Well, these dudes were the exact opposite. Every time they said something, it was helpful: “Your dog got out, but we brought him back.” “I watered your plants.” “I went to the store and I picked something up I knew you would like.” I don’t get why they had statues of David everywhere, but that was their business. Now, I had never
seen
the two men be intimate with each other. They never said to me, “We’re gay.” But did they really need to?

Just like
everybody
else, I get nervous when I walk down the street and I see a group of young black or Latin dudes. I’m not being
hateful
; I’m being cautious and I’m being safe. If it was a bunch of gay dudes, the only thing I’d be worried about is if they were judging my clothes. If it were black or Latin
women
, no one including myself would be worried. That’s because almost all violent street crime is committed by men. That’s not a racist statement and that’s not a sexist statement. That’s just
math
, motherfucker!

When someone doesn’t know you and treats you like a stereotype, it’s not always a hateful thing. It could just be a matter of playing the odds. When I go to restaurants in the summer, the waiter often brings out a free appetizer for the table. “The chef made this special for you,” he’ll tell me as he puts down that plate—which is always with watermelon. I never get worked up over shit like that. How can I be upset when people are trying their best to make me a treat to enjoy, for free? Guess what: Black people like watermelon.
So does everybody else
. How the fuck can you find watermelon offensive? It’s spectacular! After a hundred years, it’s not even a stereotype anymore; it’s an American tradition.

Are we not supposed to see stereotypes? Or are we not supposed to say what we see? As a comic and as a person, it’s my job to do as the Department of Homeland Security urges: “If you see something, say something.” Words are linguistic tools we use to connote things that exist. If stereotypes exist for a reason, then they’ve got to have a word attached to them, a name to call them. A word that is used to connote an offensive stereotype is a
slur
. Just like stereotypes, these words are very powerful. But sometimes this power can be used for good instead of evil. My wife, LaDonna, provided the perfect example of this.

Now, LaDonna is very religious and very PC. She doesn’t just see the world through rose-colored glasses; she grows the roses that you can see through. When we used to drive past the building that housed the Burbank Center for the Retarded, it upset the hell out of her. It’s not like it was the Center
Against
the Retarded. That’s just her way of seeing things. In other words: She and I are polar opposites, and that’s why I adore her.

So LaDonna came up to me all upset one day, and I took it with a grain of salt. “My father called our son, Kyle, a bitch,” she said. “I want you to say something to my dad.”

I have a very good relationship with my father-in-law, so I wanted to let him explain himself and hear what he had to say. He was happy to tell me what had happened. Apparently Kyle wouldn’t help my wife, his
mother
, with the groceries. He wouldn’t hold the door open for her. My father-in-law is seventy, so he can’t always be helping my wife with heavy bags. Instead, he chose to criticize my son in the bluntest way he could.

Rather than telling the man off, I wanted to shake his hand. I immediately went to go talk to my son. “What did Grandpa say to you?” I asked him.

“That I was acting like a bitch.”

“Next time you see your momma or your sister struggling with groceries, or you sit down before they do, that’s exactly what you’re acting like.” My son definitely got the message after that. Now he races to hold the door and helps my wife carry things. He walks her to the car and opens it for her, and he walks into the house first like a gentleman should. He
gets
it. If my father-in-law didn’t call him a powerful word, he wouldn’t have changed his disrespectful behavior.

There are words you’re not supposed to say,
ever
. I don’t even mean curse words like “fuck” or “shit.” I mean the fact that you can’t refer to “bitches” or “hos.” You’re not supposed to say “retarded” and you’re not supposed to say “nigger.” The argument goes that these words are so powerful and hurtful that they should never be used. But power isn’t always a bad thing. Power is what you use to make a bad situation into a better one. Jennifer Aniston said “retarded,” and she got in a ton of trouble for it. Then Lady Gaga said it, and
she
got in trouble. Every other week a celebrity gets in trouble for saying “nigger.”

But how can we avoid words when the living embodiments of them exist? That’s the whole
point
of having words—to refer to things that are out there. In 2010, Alvin Greene was the South Carolina Democratic candidate for the United States Senate. The man still lived with his father. Instead of answering reporters’ questions, he danced. His idea of fiscal responsibility was to sell dolls that looked like him in order to pay off the national debt.

Isn’t he a retarded nigger?

I
know
niggers. I know
a lot
of them.
Every
black person does. If a fight breaks out, I don’t want an “African-American.” I want a
nigger
—with tight skin, ashy hands, and a bad attitude. It amazes me that it’s often people who are not black who want to ban the use of that word. They don’t know what it feels like—but I sure as hell do. I’ve been called a nigger more than once in my life. But is there
anyone
who hasn’t been insulted in a nasty, below-the-belt way?

The only time being called a nigger
hurt
was when it came from a famous black comedian. He told me during a conference call, “You wouldn’t have this show if it wasn’t for me, nigger.” This wasn’t nig-
ga
: I wasn’t his boy. It made me realize for the first time that someone could use the word not to be hurtful, not to be insulting, but out of the literal belief that you are somehow inferior—and the clearest way for this comedian to express that to me was to call me a nigger. In his view, I was a second-class citizen who was beneath him, and supposedly the two of us both knew it. But calling a black man a nigger is like saying “Bloody Mary” in front of a mirror. Say it enough times, and that is exactly who will appear. I told the comedian that if he called me that when I was around, I would slap the shit out of him.

When Dog the Bounty Hunter got caught using that word on a voicemail to his son, I thought the outrage was way out of proportion. He didn’t want his son dating outside his race and expressed it in a coarse way. Well, my mother always said, “If she can’t share our comb, don’t bring her home.” My wife says the same thing. Is my family’s version better than Dog’s because it rhymes? The sentiment is pretty much the same. We’re more comfortable opposing “racism” in the form of certain words than we are acknowledging
actual
racism when it exists.

People are so scared of slurs that they freak even when the words are taken completely out of actual context. Max Bretos was suspended for thirty days from ESPN because he was discussing
Jeremy Lin and used the expression “chink in the armor.” That expression is so popular that it’s a
cliché
. That’s how expressions become clichés—they’re such a convenient shorthand for a recurring concept that people use them all the time. Bretos,
whose wife is Asian
, was clearly not making a racist reference. The term in that context has
nothing
to do with Chinese people. What possible harm could it have caused? Some Asian people winced when they heard him? I don’t bug out when British people talk about their knickers. What’s a bigger threat to Chinese people: an ESPN anchor’s nonuse of a slur, or the massive human-rights abuses perpetrated by the Chinese government? Ain’t that a “bitch”?

The NBA made an example of Kobe Bryant when he told the ref, “Bennie, you’re a faggot.” Obviously Kobe wasn’t really commenting on the ref’s sexual orientation, and no one in his right mind would think that he was. But the NBA instantly charged him $100,000 anyway.
$100,000
. There’s people who
fight
, who do bodily damage, who don’t get a $100,000 fine.

After Kobe’s comments, the Lakers had to apologize to the “gay community.” Who’s the guy who they had to contact to apologize? Who’s the ambassador for all gay people? Did the Lakers have to wake up Richard Simmons and get him out of his pink glittery bed to let him know that Kobe called the ref a faggot? Meanwhile, we live in a nation where until very recently it was okay to openly discriminate against gay people. It was not only okay, but it was the official policy of the United States government! It’s so
hypocritical
.

We make people apologize for something that they clearly aren’t sorry about—and they are apologizing for something they didn’t even intend to begin with. Growing up, if two kids got sent to the principal’s office for fighting, the principal would make us shake hands in his office—but we knew we were getting it on at three
o’clock. We’d smile and apologize to your face now, but we all saw what happened after school. Those false apologies made things
worse
. They’re not just hypocrisy; they’re
forced
hypocrisy.

Eliminating certain words is part of an attempt to sanitize history, to pretend we solved the racism issue so there is no context for certain words to ever be spoken again. It’s sweeping uncomfortable things under the rug. It used to be “offensive” dialects.
Amos ’n’ Andy
was satirically brilliant. Groups like the NAACP thought it was so divisive and so stereotypical and so incendiary that they got the show kicked off the air. Those same civil rights groups laud Tyler Perry. How many NAACP Image Awards has he won? These people saying
Amos ’n’ Andy
was extreme and dragging down our race are the exact same people saying that what Tyler Perry does is art.

Once they took care of “racist” dialects, they turned their sights on “racist” words—even if they made sense in context. Look at what they’re trying to do with Mark Twain’s children’s books. Mark Twain was a progressive guy. He said, “Not only did you free the slaves, you freed the white man.” He gave money to liberal colleges. He was raised a Presbyterian, but he was against religion. He said, “Faith is believing what you know ain’t so,” and, “If Christ were here now there is one thing he would not be—a Christian.” So now they are taking out the word “nigger” from
Huck Finn
and replacing it with “slave.” That’s
not
the same thing. If you call me a nigger, I could still be very offended as I go back to
my
house in
my
car. If you call me a slave, I gotta go with you. The educators are saying they have no choice, since they’re not allowed to teach from books with that word. Clearly, then, they need to change that rule and not tinker with a great classic that puts things in a historical context for kids.

It doesn’t stop with slurs. Even now, Texas wants to rewrite its history books so they don’t call slavery “slavery.” The slave trade would be called the “Atlantic triangular trade.” I’m aware of a lot of slurs against blacks, but “triangle” is a new one to me. They want to make it antiseptic because that makes them more comfortable. When Congress recently had a reading of the Constitution, they didn’t want to include the three-fifths compromise. Yet the compromise was to
lessen
the effects of slavery, not to increase it. Those slaves could not vote, but were represented in Congress by pro-slavery congressmen. If they let slaves have full representation, then the South would have sent
more
representatives to Washington, and it would have become that much tougher to get rid of slavery. Failing to discuss this and forbidding certain language makes us fail to acknowledge how far we’ve come. History makes you look at the mirror—and unpleasant language is an important part of history. I’m not uncomfortable with
words
. I’m uncomfortable with people pretending to be who they aren’t.