Patti Smith and Paula Deen are two white American women, born one month apart.
Why is one destroyed for using the “n-word” thirty years ago, when Smith did so in a major magazine (and elsewhere) dating back to the 1970s?
So it’s troubling to read this [1976] profile, in which a then-30 year old Smith tries to sound like a bratty, semi-feral girl half her age, throwing around weird shock-value guff about being sexually aroused by concentration camp photographs.
But one paragraph stands out:
I”f I wanna say ‘pussy,’ I’ll say ‘pussy.’ If I wanna say ‘n****r,” I’ll say ‘n****r.’ If somebody wants to call me a cracker bitch, that’s cool. It’s all part of being American. But all these tight-a**ed movements are ****ing up our slang, and that eats it.” (…)
I wandered back to Amazon and used the “Look Inside” feature to see whether or not Patti Smith used that word anywhere in her acclaimed — and supposedly candid and accurate — memoir of her artistic coming of age in 1970s New York City, called Just Kids.
I typed in every variation of the n-word I could think of. Each search yielded no results.
