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5 Feet of Fury

Kathy Shaidle's blog. Est. 2000

Why does Patti Smith get to say ‘n****r’? My NEW PJMedia post

January 10, 2014 By Kathy Shaidle

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.

More from my site

  • ‘Finally, a president who has the guts to come out against the murder of children’‘Finally, a president who has the guts to come out against the murder of children’
  • I’ll go you one better: Bill Hicks wasn’t deep and insightful, eitherI’ll go you one better: Bill Hicks wasn’t deep and insightful, either
  • My unhoped-for prediction for 2008My unhoped-for prediction for 2008
  • Megadeath’s Dave Mustaine officially nuts nowMegadeath’s Dave Mustaine officially nuts now

Filed Under: conservative blog

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