"Crooks and Liars" Leftist Blog Disses Black Conservatives on Glenn Beck

One of the most odious, mendacious and leftwing blogs on the net is the appropriately named "Crooks and Liars."  David Neiwert of Crooks and Liars (or as I prefer to call them, "Crooks, Liars and Cowards") uses tortured logic to explain away the black conservatives on Beck's show last week.  In the process, he implies that Sarah Palin is a racist, that white people are not allowed to quote Martin Luther King, and that white people invented the N word to insult black people.

I need not rebut Neiwert here; that has been done already by Another Black Conservative, Left Coast Rebel and No Sheeples Here (see links below).  I will, however, address one of his misstatements of fact, the origin of the N word.  Neiwert writes:

Moreover, it wasn't black people who invented the "N word" or the segregation from enjoying the full fruits of American citizenship it represented -- it was white people. "African American" represents the recognition of their dignity and their rights as Americans.

Neiwert is wrong.  The N word was not invented by white people to insult black people; it simply evolved from the latin word niger, which means black. Originally, the word was used in a neutral context to refer to black people and was not intended to be an insult.  The word was used by black people themselves as a self-referential term, in the 18th and 19th centuries. It was not considered to be a pejorative term by the black populace of those times (who used the word heavily), but it subsequently became one when used by racists as a term of contempt.  Note that the Oxford English Reference Dictionary states:

Among Anglophones, the word was not always considered derogatory, because it then denoted “black-skinned”, a common Anglophone usage. Nineteenth-century English (language) literature features usages of [the word] without racist connotation. [For example the works of Mark Twain.]

Neiwert says Beck should study history.  I say someone as ignorant and uninformed as Neiwert shouldn't lecture anyone on what they ought to study.

Furthermore, the term "African-American" is divisive and subtly racist in its own right, as it verbally segregates black people and over emphasizes who their ancestors were and not who they are in the here and now.  I, for example, do not call myself a "European-American" as I do not identify with Europe.  Many black people feel the same way about the term "African-American."  They do not identify with Africa.

I am reminded of Sidney Poitier's 1967 performance, "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?"  Poitier's character tells his father:  "You are my father.  I love you.  I always have.  But you see yourself as a colored man and I see myself as just a man."  Apparently, Neiwert agrees with the father.

Left Coast Rebel also has videos of Beck's show so you can watch it and draw your own conclusions.

Via:  Another Black Conservative
Via:  Left Coast Rebel
Via:  No Sheeples Here