Aloha Niggers

After participating in a conference on interracial dating I met with my husband and his friends for to discuss current events and finally got the full story about Dog the Bounty Hunter’s racist rant. Dog, The Bounty Hunter is mindless, fairly nonviolent show starring redneck with a criminal past, minimal education who hunts down minor criminals on the mean streets of The Big Island. Who could he call a nigger in Hawaii? I am not aware of a black community in Hawaii and I had never seen any black people on the show or even any dark skinned Latinos. Maybe he hurled the N word at some vacationing African Americans. Highly unlikely. Perhaps he was using it, like so many New Yorkers, as a synonym for man, dude or guy or maybe he was using it as a term of endearment, for the guys on his running crew. Could it be that he was joking around; despite what liberals and scholars say an elegantly placed “nigger please!” or “what’s up my niggers” can be quite comic. I tried to think of a scenario in which he would get the N word out Hawaiian style but came up empty, so I went hypothetical with it: If he had said it why oh why would anyone let it get captured on tape? Any such tape would be immediately destroyed to protect the show and the salaries who work on the show. It’s not exactly DVD extras material.

Finally, I let our friend share the actual story with us. Apparently, his son taped a phone conversation in which Dog did refer to his son’s girlfriend as the offending epithet multiple times. His son then turned the tape over to the media who made a field day out of it. Well some made a field day out of it while other fellow racists in the media rallied around Dog to try to salvage the damage he had done to himself. There is no way that he could have written the hollow apology he read on FOX; it was both eloquent and grammatically correct. I liked the finesse of adding an “aloha” to the black community. That means a lot to us. Can we really accept an apology from a man who doesn’t even love his own son enough restrain from verbally attacking the woman he loves with the ugliest word in our cultural lexicon? You have got to have strong convictions backed by a lot of hate to say nigger the way he did. If he must apologize he should do so for simply getting caught which is probably what he is really sorry about. Like Michael Richards and Mel Gibson, he can let his money comfort him until this whole thing is relegated to the back pages by some silly celeb’s sexcapades or until someone else says nigger. This should take about a fortnight.

The perverse thing is that everyone is so worried about Dog as if he’s any kind of victim. Some people even suggested that we should pray for him (we should pray that some brother doesn’t kick his ass on the streets) This is his creation, I say fuck him and let him stew in it. I feel concern for his son and applaud him for what he did. It was obviously a very difficult decision to make to expose his father as a bigot. It certainly must be embarrassing and I wonder how the girlfriend feels. I have a similar situation with my husband’s father and I only wish I could get him on tape proclaiming his racism. It thrills me when racists come clean and even more so when they say nigger because there is no going back. This kind of bigot outing is vital to a society which is constantly trying to sweep racism under the carpet. This country is racist, it was founded on racist principles and is unlikely to have shaken them off in a scant few centuries. Our public figures’ speech and behavior as well as our responses to them merely reflect this reality.