Nannyism Backfires

A few weeks ago, I wrote about New York City Councilman Leroy Comrie (D-Queens) and his attempt to expand the city's metastasizing supervisory purview over its people to include dictating which words are acceptable for vocalization within the city limits.  Specifically at issue was the "N word".  Comrie's initiative sought to "begin a campaign of awareness about the word" by triggering our legislature's spastic banning reflex, rather than by actually encouraging private citizens and organizations to actually wage a "campaign of awareness".

But if Comrie's idea was that the word in question is simply so taboo, so poisonous that we do indeed need to symbolically trample First Amendment rights in order to prevent its utterance, then the effort has run afoul.

At a hearing yesterday on a resolution to discourage the use of the n-word, the racially offensive term was heard more times than on a Kanye West album.

The spewing of the slur nearly 50 times in less than two hours angered the anti-n-word measure's sponsor, Councilman Leroy Comrie (D-Queens).

"If I had been the chair, I would have asked them not to use the word," Comrie told The Post afterward. "I was not pleased."

Marcia Harris, founder of the Harlem-based Ban the N-Word Movement, got the ball rolling with a passionate lecture on the word's origins - that dropped the n-bomb a staggering 19 times.

It's enough to make Michael Richards blush.

Previously:
New York's Runaway Banwagon
iNanny
New York Loves the N-Word
Nannyism Is the New Black
Nannyism in New York