Rainbow hates the word and is aghast that her husband basically taught it to their young son through Kanye West sing-alongs on the way to school (not to be forgotten: Rainbow is biracial, with one white and one black parent, which often gives her a different perspective than that of her black husband). President Barack Obama employed the word during a June podcast with comedian Marc Maron to illustrate the country’s continuing discomfort with race.
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Mm-hmm. Not if you can’t say [bleep] It’s not. He also notes that Quentin Tarantino wrote the word over a hundred times in Django and won an Oscar. And like many of us, he believes the word is for Black use only.
While he felt that the usage of the word should be included in the show, Barris noted that the timing wasn’t always right.
“Think it’s a show we’ve never seen before”, she said. “In this time when we’re suppose to be an elevated society, the word is still as prevalent as Jim Crow”.
The controversial word was prominently invoked recently and by someone with more power than a television program. There are some of the expected platitudes regarding white people not being allowed to determine who says the inflammatory word and how and if it’s appropriate for black people to be so cavalier with its use. Despite my frustrations with last season, I have high hopes for this show’s sophomore effort.
Who can? Let the office’s resident non-Dre black people, Charles and Allen, explain! Instead of a thorough dissection, though, what follows is a amusing but fairly glib gloss on the subject, as Jack uses the word at a school talent show and is threatened with expulsion, and his parents scramble to excuse (Bow) or defend (Dre) his behavior.
Andre: Dammit, it’s his birthright! “And n****rs have got to go”. When the boss brings up NAACP as a counterpoint, Dre says, “You know, that group been sending mixed messages for a long time”. Or even extremely unlikely because of the persistence of racism.
1) African Americans. This week, rapper/producer David Banner posted an Instagram video questioning non-black rappers’ use of the word. But I don’t think it was really part of what the DNA of the show was.
As far as how well the petition to get the President and the First Lady on the show is going, it looks like for now, it’s slow moving. It’d be easy to judge Zoe for freely “allowing” her friends to use it, but they’re of a different generation and have their own set of rules, much like our own generation operates differently than the one before us. The season two premiere airs tonight, Wednesday on ABC. The pilot of NBC’s new series “Truth Be Told”, about two diverse couples, features an energetic exchange between Mitch (Mark-Paul Gosselaar), who is white, and his best friend, Russell (Tone Bell), who is black.
Anthony Anderson, star of ABC’s black-ish, joined Roland Martin on NewsOne Now to discuss the Season 2 premiere of the smash hit sitcom. My kids go to private school and hate speech has been given zero tolerance, and I think that’s great and really important. It’s even harder to pull off, when there’ve been countless academic discussions, theses and standup sets about it. There’s no Black people? “She was like-What, what, Dad?” Can anyone say it? They definitely are, especially when done fluently, so you had to expect there’d be a “Nigga Episode” at some point in the history of Black-ish and it came last night in a solid episode titled “THE Word”. The network approved without hesitation.
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“I want them to experience Aaron McGruder’s brilliant writing materialized”, he said.
