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Won’t You Please Be My Nigga: Double Standards with a Taboo Word By Alex Alonso for Streetgangs Magazine May 30, 2003 Imagine if Mr. Rogers began his show off with the song, won’t you be mine, won’t you be mine, please won’t you be my nigga. He would have been the recipient of a severe backlash that would have had his show off the air in 24 days rather than the 24 years he was on the air in the US (1967-2001). This is partly because the word “nigga” in American vernacular, that goes back several centuries, was originally used exclusively in a derogatory sense to denigrate, psychologically subjugate, and to mentally scar the individual identities of blacks in the United States by white aggressors. It was a word that the European settlers used to dehumanize, demoralize and weaken the spirits of defenseless Africans and their slave families. The word continued to be publicly used after Emancipation, and during the civil rights period in the 20th Century it was popular with Southern Democrats. George Wallace publicly used it as he campaigned on the segregation ticket when he was elected governor of Alabama in 1966. Warning: include_once(/home2/street13/public_html/vote/booth.php) [function.include-once]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/street13/public_html/magazine/053003niggas.php on line 134 Warning: include_once() [function.include]: Failed opening '/home2/street13/public_html/vote/booth.php' for inclusion (include_path='.:/usr/lib/php:/usr/local/lib/php') in /home/street13/public_html/magazine/053003niggas.php on line 134 Fatal error: Call to a member function poll_process() on a non-object in /home/street13/public_html/magazine/053003niggas.php on line 135