Can We Not Govern Ourselves? — Jul 17th 2007

By Alexia Prichard

In May 1976, South African activist Steve Biko testified at the trial of nine of his colleagues, who were being charged with violating apartheid laws. At one point, the defense sought to clarify the origin of Biko's "Black Consciousness" movement, thinking this might help the accused. Like the American Black Power movement, Black Consciousness had been designed to combat demoralizing negative stereotypes.

Looking back to the previous decade, Biko recalled how he and his colleagues had decided that "they would no longer use the term Non-Whites, nor allow it to be used as a description of them, because they saw it as a negation of their being. They were being stated as 'non-something,' which implied that the standard was something and they were not that particular standard. They felt that a positive view to life, which is commensurate with the build-up of one's dignity and confidence, would be contained in a description which you accept, and they sought to replace the term Non-White with the term Black."

This simple tactic was remarkably effective in restoring some measure of personal dignity. It was the beginning of a process that led first to resistance, then to the Soweto uprising, and which eventually broke the back of apartheid in 1991.

On July 8, 2007, the opening day of the 98th annual NAACP convention, Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick presided over a mock funeral for the "N word." In the course of this ceremony, which included a horse-drawn casket, that controversial epithet was symbolically buried. The previous day, an identical ceremony took place in Houston. And back in April, on the heels of the Michael Richards and Imus fiascos, rap guru Russell Simmons called for a moratorium on the words "nigger," "bitch," and "ho" in songs played on the radio.

Even here at Netscape, we have software mechanisms to censor certain words. We've seen our users use them negatively toward others, and we want to do everything we can to ensure a consistently positive experience on our site.

The thing is: it isn't working. Not on our site, and not in society at large. Inappropriate verbal abuse continues to run rampant. Polemics abound, as we can see in the clip below from the 2007 Milken Institute Global Conference, and the NAACP and Russell Simmons weigh in, but nobody addresses the root of the problem: that we are all adults acting like spoiled, ill-mannered children. We need to stop. We need to reverse the tide.

Tags: Imus, Milken 2007, netscape video

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