You are using an outdated browser.
Please upgrade your browser
and improve your visit to our site.
Skip Navigation

Sanest Quote Ever

By Daniel Drezner

Michael Richards' on-stage meltdownAccording to the APAccording to the Los Angeles Times' Valerie Reitman
Joe Hicks, vice president of the civil rights organization Community Advocates Inc., called the move to ban the word "just silly and outrageous." Outside the stray white bigot, the N-word is pervasive only in black communities and among hip-hop and rap artists, "not in the business world, not in the American court system, not in the government." Hicks, an African American and former director of the Los Angeles Human Relations Commission, said Waters and others shouldn't be trying to alter the course of contemporary urban culture and accused them of "racial opportunism." "Here's this guy [Richards], who's been nearly out of work with virtually no career to speak of, who's hand-grenaded his career in front of the whole world