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Who Is Winning the War on Offensive Words?
By Eric Hinton
August 10, 2007
Rap music took center stage earlier this week as the National Day of Outrage prompted protests in cities across the country, including New York, Los Angeles, Richmond and Houston, as offensive lyrics in rap music were targeted.
The protest is the latest in the war on offensive words, which, in recent months, has seen New York symbolically bury the N-word and declare the word "queer" offensive.
You can thank Don Imus. The protests are an outgrowth of the comments made by the shock jock against the Rutgers women's basketball team. Defenders of Imus' "nappy-headed-hos" comment rightly noted that rappers routinely degraded women with misogynistic lyrics with little rebuke. But that's changed in recent months as hip-hop entrepreneur Russell Simmons and groups such as the National Action Network have focused on the misogynistic lyrics in rap music.
Earlier this year, the NAACP's Youth and College Division, along with the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network, denounced denigrating lyrics and images in rap music and launched an effort asking that record companies bleep out offensive words. The STOP initiative is also targeting the television industry, demanding it stop defaming women, degrading the community and black history and start supporting diverse voices in hip hop.
The "decency initiative" promoted by the National Action network is urging public divestment from the music industry until offensive language is removed from lyrics.
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