The Whiteboy & The N-Word **EXCLUSIVE**

I clearly remember the first two tapes I owned.  I was probably like 6..nah, maybe 7.  I listened to them so much that the writing on the tapes faded quickly.  I remember walking to the bus stop to catch the school bus and trying to remember the words to Peter Piper.  It probably took me longer than the average to learn “Now Peter Piper picked peppers but Run rocked rhymes…” And it took me even longer to be able to rap with Run as the song blasted through my cheap-ass walkman with big, ugly headphones.  I thought I had a license to ill when Mike D. told me about “a little story I got to tell about three bad brothers…”  I grew up on hip-hop.  I lived for it.  But, there was always one word that made me uncomfortable.  And in the early days of hip-hop, you really didn’t hear that word a lot.  But, like TLC, it kept creepin’ in.

I remember the early 90’s when the word blew up like the world….trade.  Every rapper was using it (or least most of ‘em) and the idea that young, black America could take back a word that had historically been used against them, as a form of empowerment was introduced.  But, still to me, I was uncomfortable with it. Yeah, my mother (who is white) rode on the back of the buses in the South during the Civil Rights Movement and my father (who is white) was in Chicago during the Democratic Convention of 1968, but I always felt that this was one word that I should never use.  So, I didn’t and I haven’t.

It was always a trick to flip the lyrics of my favorite MC’s, replacing this word with usually…brotha.  So for instance, when Biggie said in Sky’s The Limit, “A n**** never been as broke as me, I like that / When I was young I had two pair of Lees, besides that” – I would flip it to “A brotha never been as broke as me, I like that…”  I think you get the point.  I always respected the use of the word for the sense of empowerment, but for me, it wasn’t a word that would come out of my mouth, cause I respected that when a white kid said, it meant a whole different thing.  My man Chris Rock explains it much better than me:

So, yesterday when I was reading the initial headlines about John Mayer’s interview in Playboy, I didn’t pay much mind, cause they were focusing on his comments about Jennifer Aniston and Jessica Simpson – just felt like some gossipy stuff.  Then I read the entire interview, and came across this passage, “What does it feel like now to have a hood pass?” And by the way, it’s sort of a contradiction in terms, because if you really had a hood pass, you could call it a n*gger pass.”  like Black Rob, I was like WOAH!  I knew this would be the line that would get him in troubl