The first time that a person who wasn't black used the word "nikka" to address me face-to-face came when I was out of the country. I was playing basketball for a team in a small, largely Croatian village in Bosnia-Herzegovina. I was walking down the street when I passed three adolescent boys going in the other direction on the opposite side. They were visibly excited to come across a black person in the flesh and called out to me: "Hey man, what's up? Hey, my nikka, how you do?" I didn't respond. I didn't know how to respond. I kept walking, feeling my ears burn and my jaw tighten. In my mind I saw images of barking dogs. The rest of the walk home was a blur. When I had cooled down, I wondered: Were they really trying to insult me? Or had their exposure to black culture led them to believe that this was how I'd like to be greeted?
There are generally four schools of thought on the word "nikka." There's the first and largest group -- black working-class (but not exclusively so) people who say it casually because it's what they've always done, or simply because they don't like being told what to do. There's the small but vocal group of middle-class black intellectuals who claim to have "reclaimed" the word, to have turned it into a term of endearment instead of a tool of oppression. It's a neat solution to a messy problem. It ends in "A," after all! This line of thinking is what led us to where Kanye West is currently -- "re-contextualizing" Confederate flags as tour merch. This last seems idiotic at first blush but might yet be proven to be genius. It's too early to talk about it with any sort of nuance, but it's a good marker of the extreme left of the dialogue.
The third group is comprised of the "respectable Negroes," the bootstrap types, the "don't you embarrass me in front of these white folks" crowd. Also largely middle- and upper-middle class, the worst of these would have us believe that if black men only pulled their pants up, stopped littering and stopped calling each other that word, racism and...
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I have only read half of it so far but this is on some @Walt level of writing. Great hire by ESPN.
There are generally four schools of thought on the word "nikka." There's the first and largest group -- black working-class (but not exclusively so) people who say it casually because it's what they've always done, or simply because they don't like being told what to do. There's the small but vocal group of middle-class black intellectuals who claim to have "reclaimed" the word, to have turned it into a term of endearment instead of a tool of oppression. It's a neat solution to a messy problem. It ends in "A," after all! This line of thinking is what led us to where Kanye West is currently -- "re-contextualizing" Confederate flags as tour merch. This last seems idiotic at first blush but might yet be proven to be genius. It's too early to talk about it with any sort of nuance, but it's a good marker of the extreme left of the dialogue.
The third group is comprised of the "respectable Negroes," the bootstrap types, the "don't you embarrass me in front of these white folks" crowd. Also largely middle- and upper-middle class, the worst of these would have us believe that if black men only pulled their pants up, stopped littering and stopped calling each other that word, racism and...
Read more
I have only read half of it so far but this is on some @Walt level of writing. Great hire by ESPN.
One side had a sad QB who thought he was the next RGIII or some chit. Dude could not see his experienced receivers who ran a slant or hook for 5 yards on the outsides. Open with no coverage. He was locked in on receivers crossing up the middle where there was a ton of traffic. The other side had a better QB but he was telegraphing all his passes. but was at least moving the ball up and hitting his receivers. A zero-tolerance 4-3 defense would have shut that down, but dudes are out there playing lazy defense saving their energy for offense so it didn't matter. He didn't have options so if the defense did shut him down on the pass play, he threw the ball away... he couldn't pull out a Andrew Luck option play out of his butt even if he tried.
