Efforts to ban the epithet being stepped up in Texas:
"As a child of the '60s, Tammie Campbell endured an era when white residents frequently used the N-word to degrade black people. Local rapper D-Red knows the word's hateful history but says it's now just a hip-hop expression and a term of endearment.
Those two thoughts about one of the most divisive racial epithets in America are at the center of an extraordinary movement in recent months: to abolish the N-word from our lexicon.
Campbell, 48, is leading a diverse Houston-area group focused on eradicating the term's usage and teaching its history. They are hosting an unusual event at 9 a.m. today at a Pearland cemetery to ''bury the N-word" in a coffin.
"This word wasn't created by blacks," said Campbell, the former president of the Missouri City NAACP. "It was created by whites. They have a responsibility as well as blacks - more so than anybody else - to destroy and annihilate this racial term that has hurt this nation as a whole."
Source
He's right that blacks did not create the word. It's the ordinary Latin word for "black" in fact -- though pronounced with a shorter "i" sound -- signified by the double "g" -- unlike the single "g" in the Latin "niger". Ban Latin!
