While on a charity ride in Africa, international bicyclist David Sylvester came across an African-owned hip-hop shop called Niggers. Astonished and offended, he wrote to the Bowling Green State University African-American Graduate Association.
In his e-mail to BGSU, Sylvester said: "The word and the sentiment behind it is flat out wrong. We have degraded ourselves to the point that our backwards mind set has spread like a cancer and infected our source, our brothers, our sisters, our motherland."
Today's Brown Bag luncheon, titled "Nigger Shop," is open to people of all races and is from noon to 1 p.m. at the Multicultural Center, 325 N. McKinley Ave.
"The issue is not the spelling, it is how negatively that word has affected the world," LaShonda Fuller, assistant director of the Ball State University Multicultural Center, said.
After receiving Sylvester's e-mail from the list server, Fuller said she noticed how she was guilty of condoning the word's use by listening to certain music artists and watching certain movies that prominently feature it, not correcting others when they used the word around her and not correcting her own use when she was younger.
Fuller then decided to explore the word's effects via the Multicultural Center's monthly Brown Bag Luncheon. The luncheons are hour-long discussions of important topics where people bring their lunches with them. Past topics have included the Brown vs. Board of Education U.S. Supreme Court case and the relationship between black power and racial reconciliation.
Some blacks have embraced the word, but changed the context around it to mean something positive by spelling the word 'nigga.'
"The purpose of this Brown Bag Luncheon is to expose the interpretations of the word, how it affects other people's understanding of it and how easily the word is misused," said Fuller, who will facilitate today's discussion. "Hopefully it will encourage people who attend to not want to use the word if they do."
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