{"id":155,"date":"2006-11-29T15:14:02","date_gmt":"2006-11-29T20:14:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/2006\/11\/29\/the-n-word\/"},"modified":"2006-11-29T21:17:12","modified_gmt":"2006-11-30T02:17:12","slug":"the-n-word","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/2006\/11\/29\/the-n-word\/","title":{"rendered":"The N-word"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.slate.com\/id\/2154567\/\">Read this<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>(Personally, I&#8217;ve shied away from using it, thinking it mostly unhelpful.  Ms. McWhorter gives me good reason to reconsider.)<\/p>\n<p><strong>Update<\/strong>:  Lest you be tempted to skip it, take note of this paragraph:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>We have become such &#8220;good Americans&#8221; that we no longer have the moral imagination to picture what it might be like to be in a bureaucratic category that voids our human rights, be it &#8220;enemy combatant&#8221; or &#8220;illegal immigrant.&#8221; Thus, in the week before the election, hardly a ripple answered the latest decree from the Bush administration: Detainees held in CIA prisons were forbidden from telling their lawyers what methods of interrogation were used on them, presumably so they wouldn&#8217;t give away any of the top-secret torture methods that we don&#8217;t use. Cautiously, I look back on that as the crystallizing moment of Bushworld: tautological as a Gilbert and Sullivan libretto, absurd as a Marx Brothers movie, and scary as a Kafka novel.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I well and truly hope she is wrong on that &#8211; if America &#8220;no longer ha[s] the moral imagination to picture what it might be like to be in a bureaucratic category that voids our human rights&#8221;, then my America is no more.  And while I admit that, at various points in the past few years, I have been near sure that that is true, I am not yet ready to accept it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Read this. (Personally, I&#8217;ve shied away from using it, thinking it mostly unhelpful. Ms. McWhorter gives me good reason to reconsider.) Update: Lest you be tempted to skip it, take note of this paragraph: We have become such &#8220;good Americans&#8221; that we no longer have the moral imagination to picture what it might be like [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":4,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2,8,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal","category-politics","category-society"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=155"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}