Rarely am I inspired by celebrity Gossip to take to my keys and write but I have come across a recent event that has fascinated and inspired me to put pen to paper. Gwyneth and her 'Niggas'. Recently Gwyneth Paltrow tweeted 'Niggas in Paris For real' next to a picture of herself and two friends on stage. The interesting thing is the very clear line that divides people on this appears to be entirely non-racial. The people who are 'down' with Gwyn 'flossing' with her 'niggas'. Are black and white. The people who are very much NOT are also black and white, so who are these groups and what the heck is going on?
From what I have read it appears that the group who were opposed to Gwyneth's tweet imagined that the gentlemen she was on stage with were being insulted by the self-confessed 'Paella addict'. Her mistake of course was not to use a pre-fix - had she said 'MY Niggas' she would of course been implying that she was a 'Nigga' herself. I imagine that this is what she meant to tweet but was prevented from doing so by the endemic uncertainty and complexity of etiquette these kinds of occasions throw up or in Gwyn's case 'throw down.' Had she tweeted 'THE niggas' well that's a whole different article.
So the debate here is can Gwyneth Paltrow be a Nigga, or is she just too pale? Well 'where I come from, we don't let society tell us how it's s'pose to be, our clothes, our hair, we don't care, its all about being there…..Black, white, puerto rican, everybody just freakin' - good time's are rollin'.'
If only life were that simple.
As long as people let themselves and others be defined by society's woefully limiting gender and racial stereotypes we will never transcend the shackles of our shared histories horrors. The hegemonising of the word 'Nigger' has been extraordinary. We have seen it come along way from days of slavery and segregation, when it was used like a bullet fired off with the sole intention to degrade and humiliate. The adaptation of the word into the modern day rapper's vocabulary was a deliberate act designed to diffuse the word, to extract its poison, to destabilise it, to strip it of its powers and to re-appropriate it as street slang meaning 'homies', 'dudes', 'peeps' etc. Gwyneth in fact used the very correct term for her friends that night as it is common place in the rapping world for rap artists and the people they hang out with to refer to themselves as niggas and in doing so debase it's previous oppressive powers. If it matters to you that she is white then you are actually a racist. Ain't no biggie my Nigga Gwynie (next time don't forget the 'MY….)
