Nader uses the n-word during a speech.

[LoZoccolo]

Al Sharpton (below) took issue with Ralph Nader's use of a racial epithet at a Washington fund-raiser.

<snip>

Speaking Wednesday night at a Washington fund-raiser to retire the debt from his 2004 presidential campaign, Nader complained that Democratic Party powerbrokers had kept him off the ballot in such Southern states as Georgia and Virginia - which reminded him of the oppressive Jim Crow laws that denied African-Americans equal rights.

"I felt like a (n-word)," remarked the 70-year-old white multimillionaire graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/gossip/story/319830p-273490c.html

[aden_nak]

1. Wow, maybe I should add Ralph to my new bumper sticker instead.

[goclark]

2. Good of Al to call him on it

Nader should surely know better.

[davidinalameda]

3. he's not "white"

he's Middle Eastern

but his analogy leaves a bit to be desired

[ProfessorGAC]

7. But, He's Not Arab Is He?

I thought he was Lebanese. That would make him Mediterranean like Greeks, Spaniards, and Italians like me. And, i'm white. Nothing ambiguous about it.
The Professor

[Inland]

12. Aren't lebanese a subset of Arab?

[ProfessorGAC]

15. I Don't Think So

I think that Lebanese folks are closer to the same lines as those that settled the Mediterranean. That's why Lebanese folks have facial features more like Greeks and we of southern italian descent.

We had a family in our neighborhood when i was a kid. The mom and dad were both immigrants from Lebanon and i always thought they looked like people in my family. I've never seen anyone of Arab descent that looked italian.

I think that's a different variant of the species than is Arab. I'm not 100% sure, but i've always thought that Lebanese folks were more like the rest of the Med nationalities than the Semitic variants farther south. I could be wrong though.
The Professor

[Inland]

16. Egyptians, Tunisians, and Syrians go by "Arab" too

altought their ancestors may never have set foot in the Arabian Pennisula and are from largely different stock.

I think Arab is as much those that were conquered as those who were from.

Maybe a Lebanese could weigh in.

[davidinalameda]

19. Iranians aren't Arab either

does it really matter

he certainly isn't blonde haired and blue eyed

[LoZoccolo]

20. Well, neither are a lot of white people.

Still, white or not, the word isn't one he should use in that way, even if it wasn't hostile.

[Inland]

4. Poor, persecuted Nader......no function but running for president

and the bad racist democrats won't let him, so he has to take Republican money and republican petitions.

Yeah, it's just like Jim Crow.

[geek tragedy]

5. Just when I thought he couldn't get any worse, he proves me wrong.

Never underestimate Ralph Nader's vanity and insanity.

[Ron Green]

6. It's a powerful word, guaranteed to spark discussion.

I don't think it has to be put in some sort of museum, or used like a secret handshake of exclusivity. It's a word that requires some understanding, and I think Nader has done his share of homework on understanding what it has meant and what it still means.

[Inland]

11. In this case, a discussion of Nader's faults.

That says more about Nader and his decision to use it in the context of comparing his failed presidential campaigns to jim crow laws.

[Rowdyboy]

8. Nader continues to humiliate himself and besmirch his once proud

career. Its years past time for him to STFU.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

9. Talk about grasping at straws. Look at the context.

Sharpton is full of shit on this one.

[Terran]

21. What context are you referring to?

And how is Sharpton full of shit? Explain. You might also read this part of the article:

Yesterday, Nader told me he was using the word in the same spirit as the Black Panthers of the 1960s - "as a word of defiance."

But Sharpton retorted: "He's not a Black Panther."

Democratic operative Harold Ickes - a former civil rights activist who lost a kidney in 1965 after being beaten to a pulp by white racists in Tallulah, La. - was also troubled by Nader's use of the epithet.

"It's not something that I would say," Ickes told me yesterday. "Having grown up in the 1950s and 1960s, I think it's not a word that whites can use.

Sorry man, but n*gger is just not a word white people can get away with using, no matter what context *they* might be invoking. Nader is the one who's full of shit here.

[Ron Green]

22. Sharpton's complaint was that Nader was "sanitizing" the word.

I think his idea is that the word should not be defused as a powerful reminder of its racist roots, although I'm not sure how he feels about "niggaz" mentioned throughout the hip-hop world.

Everyone's experience with this word is slightly different, and to make it a shibboleth or automatically off-limits to some and acceptable to others is to diminish our understanding of its history and power.

[Terran]

27. I think you're missing Sharpton's point

It's bad enough for any white person to go around using the n-word when talking about Black people in almost any but an academic context. What Sharpton is rightly upset about is a white man actually referring to himself as a "n*gger". Such an act truly does tend to debase the meaning of the word. It's the same logic as comparing, for instance, the mythical persecution of Christians in contemporary America to the Holocaust. People who actually went through the Holocaust, and their descendents, get justifiably upset.

But you apparently feel that this has the opposite effect, that a white man calling himself a "n*gger" increases "our understanding of its history and power." Now, since only Black people have historically been called n*ggers, how exactly does it increase our understanding of the word's history when white people start going around referring to themselves as n*ggers? Kind of confuses things, I would say. Wouldn't you?

I didn't say it was off-limits. Speech is never off-limits, by its nature. It's just that most thinking people know that certain words are appropriate and certain words are not. "N*gger" is THE MOST inappropriate word a white person can use, bar none. Only fools and very small children don't know that.

And re: "nigga". Ask around and I believe the majority of African-Americans will tell you that there is a distinct difference between "nigga" and "n*gger", both in meaning and history, such that they are really two distinct words.

[Ron Green]

29. I don't think it necessarily confuses things.

Nader didn't actually REFER to himself, he said he FELT "like a nigger." The distinction here is that he didn't claim identity, he claimed status, or lack thereof. He had been systematically shut out of the electoral process in the South, just as blacks had been for so many years, and he used the word that describes the lowest treatment that our country has afforded people.

Sharpton's concern, that Nader was "sanitizing" the word, stems partly from his vigilance in maintaining the national memory of slavery and Jim Crow, and partly from the political power that comes from exclusivity: he was one of only two Presidential candidates who could have used the word in the campaign without political death.

And if "nigga" is a distinct word, then I would suggest that "nigger" itself is much more complex than only one meaning. Anyone who grew up in the South, especially in the '50s and '60s, knows how many shades of meaning were carried with that word. I think that to regard it monolithically (to the point of refusing to utter or write it) is not just to acknowledge its awful history, but to ignore its complexity.

[RandomKoolzip]

10. RandomKoolzip uses the "A-word" to describe Ralph Nader.

Asshole.

[Kraklen]

13. Yeah, that's just like the Jim Crow laws.

Nice analogy, Ralph.

[Plaid Adder]

14. I love the way they worked in the quote.

"...remarked the 70 year old white multimillionaire graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School." It's like a reverse Tom Swifty.

Maybe we could get them to do stuff like this to the Bush administration:

"People have lost their lives over this Newsweek story," said the wiry, bespectacled, Secretary of Defense who has presided like the grim reaper he so resembles over the deaths of uncounted thousands of Iraqi and Afghan civilians.

C ya,

The Plaid Adder

[Logansquare]

17. I've read that a certain percentage of Parkinson's patients

develop dementia, especially males. Maybe Nader is really losing it?

[livinginphotographs]

18. I've always given Nader the benefit of the doubt..

(even after 2000), but that remark of his was totally inappropriate. Good on Al Sharpton for calling him on it.

[ulysses]

23. well, that makes welfare reform all better then.

[Zhade]

24. *Snort*

Nice.

Bad Nader, though. BAD!

[ulysses]

26. it's "gonadal politics" all over again.

Thoroughly stupid way to put something, but I don't think it makes him any more an unreconstructed racist than the other comment made him homophobic.

Nader's irrelevant now, anyway.

[youspeakmylanguage]

25. What a sad sack of sh*t Nader has become...

I can't believe I ever supported the man.

[sundancekid]

28. if he had to exploit an epithet, he might have accurately referred to

himself as the uncle tom of the republican party, thank you very much!

p.s. NO EPITHET is justified in my book, but I start to throw eggs and tomatoes when they do the ugly pity shuffle when instead they have exploited and manipulated every aspect of two-against-the-middle.

:nopity:

[Straight Shooter]

30. Couldn't he have said, "I empathize more and more with the oppressed"?

Sometimes Ralph can be stupid. Mind-boggling stupid.

[Catherine Vincent]

31. I can't believe Nader would say that. I'm shocked.

WTF is wrong with him? He should know better than that!