@RCArmitage retweets the N Word

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And I’m not OK with it. Keke Palmer has previous posts on BS. Why choose this one, Richard Armitage? WTF were they both thinking?

36 thoughts on “@RCArmitage retweets the N Word”

  1. My personal position is that no one does themselves any favors by using that word, but there are so many layers here (musical genre, tweeter, retweeter, each with their cultural and generational assumptions). Reminding myself that they probably hired her to attract a younger, hipper audience.

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        • As a singer in that genre herself, I can see her choosing a song like this and with the message that she’s having such a great time that people want to be like her. Maybe, though, what’s “cool” for a 23-year-old black singer to tweet isn’t “cool” for a 45-year-old white guy.

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          • I don’t think it’s as simple as “it’s song lyrics.” Part of the question for me is who the audience for those lyrics is. As I said earlier below, I’m not going to tell an African American how to speak or think about herself; I do enough of that implicitly just by existing within a privileged group. But I also know from reading I’ve done that the major buyers of this kind of music (I’ve read different articles in different places that have given different figures, so I’ll just say, a big chunk of its consumer segment) are suburban white youth, who see it as protest / épater le bourgeois music. There’s an intrinsic problem for me in supporting a cultural form where white youth capitalize on a black person’s caricatured re-appropriation of an oppressive racial slur as protest. If black artists want to do this kind of performance, that’s their privilege but I still don’t think it does anyone any favors — the singer/rapper or the audience that cheers them on. The white observer is simply using the black artist for his/her own purposes, just in a not so blatantly obvious way as old school racists did — and paying money to use the performance in that way. It turns political racism into a kind of capitalist transaction.

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            • Hmmm. Food for thought.
              My guess (but who knows) is that for her it probably was as simple as song lyrics, in the moment. But maybe the point is that more thought should have gone into it for both of them before posting.

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  3. Are you talking about the word “N” why is it bothering you ? Black do talk about each other like that . Surely is nothing offending . He might want to be cool too . 😶

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  4. I’m offended by the word no matter how it’s spelled. I also don’t buy that we are “re-appropriating” the word to render it meaningless. It’s a demeaning word and will always be one.

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  6. What I’m wrestling about this is what I always wrestle with on this question: I was raised to believe that one never says that word. For any reason. Ever. By my not especially woke parents. Which suggests that it’s taboo in the US not just on the left but also deep into very conservative circles.

    On the other hand I’m not going to tell a member of a minority how to refer to herself.

    (which is why I said “no one does themselves any favors”).

    The thing is that Richard Armitage is not black. He’s also not American so his racial burden is different from ours, and I’ve encountered this with Brits before. Maybe he listens to music where this is a normal word. But it still kind of comes down to that for me: Armitage is not black.

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  9. Leave this poor man alone, for god’s sake! It seems he can’t do anything right in his so-called fandom! Why do you even bother being his fan when everything he does mages you outrageous?!

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    • First of all, who said I’m outraged? Criticism isn’t necessarily outrage. Perhaps you may be outraged that others dare to criticize him. And, who said everything he does outrages me? Have you read this blog before? He’s an actor. I am a fan of his acting. That’s why I bother.

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  12. Sigh. That still is my main reaction. I won’t preted to really understand the reasons why using that term might ve seen as cool in a certain generational/ musical context. It will never sound any other way as demeaning to me and i wouldn’t dream of using it or repeating anything that used it. I can only assume he used it because it included the video if her dancing and that’s ‘cool’. It’s way too sticky a subject to touch upon but personally i would stay away from sharing anything with language which i wouldn’t want people to start using without fully understanding all the implications. His share might be understood as encouraging the view that all that is ‘cool’. I’m going to remain old fashioned on this issue however and say that i’m not at all convinced that any use of it should be ok. Hard not to think how he would maybe feel if his nephew repeated the lyrics or would he ever do so himself? I would hope not…

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