My mea culpa goes out to anyone who had to behold the shameless spectacle that involved button-pushing comic Lisa Lampanelli using the word “nigga” in a tweet, then arguing against a torrent of condemnation from the Twitterverse that it was socially acceptable.

You see, I have argued in print for years that people are too precious about avoiding the word “nigger” when the subject is at hand. When the NAACP held a funeral for the word, I wrote a column praising its intentions but opposing its actions.

A word should never be banned out of context, I argued. Especially a word with such conflicted and confusing history for those of us who are darker than blue.

When Spike Lee and other well-known cultural commentators began to pile on Quentin Tarantino for his liberal use of the N-word in his blaxploitation western masterpiece "Django Unchained," I wrote a story for this very outlet insisting that Tarantino had tapped a proud history in creating modern Hollywood’s first black superhero.

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