The votes are in...

So thank you to all the (80) people who voted in the poll on the dreaded n-word. The results are quite interesting on a number of levels:

1. Maths isn't my strong point but it adds up to 99%, so I guess there are stray decimal points somewhere.
2. Lots of people from outside SFX have voted because there are only 13 (self-identified) black people in the poll and that's probably about 20% of the total number of black students we have in AS and A2.
3. While 11% of respondents are black and don't use the n-word, 5% are black and do use it. The vast majority (88%) don't use it at all.

What does this tell us? Well not a lot. Some explanatory comments would be useful to go with this. For the 5 white or Asian respondents who say they *do* use the word, what context is it in? Are you marking out your affinity to black culture (whatever that means) or are you unreconstructed racists? And for the 9 black respondents who don't use the word, what are your objections? What it does tell us is that polls like this are only moderately helpful in gauging people's attitudes. So let that be a lesson to you when you do your language investigation coursework! Useful for: ENA1 - Language and Representation EA4C - Language Investigation

Don't blame hip hop

Following on from what I thought was a rather good discussion this morning about the dreaded n-word, Asher D's Sticks and Stones programme, and the influence or otherwise of rap lyrics, I stumbled across this article in the New York Times. Given all the furore around the use of the n-word and the recent attempts by members of the black community in the USA to get the word taken out of circulation, the article points to the growth of more party-orientated lyrics in recent hip hop tracks and poses the interesting questions: "What if hip-hop’s lyrics shifted from tough talk and crude jokes to playful club exhortations — and it didn’t much matter? What if the controversial lyrics quieted down, but the problems didn’t? What if hip-hop didn’t matter that much, after all?" So, is hip hop really to blame for the growth in the n-word? Does it really matter? Will its recent resurgence die out naturally? Answers on the barrel of a Gloc 9mm... or posted as comments below might be nicer.