Last year, Kendrick Lamar — the Grammy and Pulitzer Prize-winning rapper — invited a group from the audience at his concert onstage for a group rap-along to his song m.A.A.d. It was all going well until one over-enthusiastic white girl named Delaney knew a few too many words (all of them), and inadvertently (we’ll assume) said the “n” word several times during her moment in the spotlight. Kendrick Lamar grew upset, informed her that those portions were to be bleeped, and asked her to leave the stage.
“It’s over,” he said in a moment immortalized like every other — with a grainy video to capture the incident in all of its infamy.
There was little subtlety in the subtext: It’s not OK to use the “n” word if you are not black. Period.
Unfortunately, Sufian Suhaimi, a popular Malaysian pop star, did not get this memo, and last week posted this photo to his Instagram account, with this actual caption:
The reaction was swift, and netizens were quick to condemn his flippant usage of the word, with no context other than him putting on a pair of shoes, and trying out some weird kind of flex.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that the “n” word, styled with an -a at the end, is part of hip-hop culture and is routinely peppered throughout plenty of current songs that come to mind.
However, it’s still a word that cuts — and cuts deep — African-Americans who have dealt with centuries of racism resulting in deaths, attacks, and marginalization. Somewhere along the line, Eminem got a pass to use it, but honestly, it still feels more than a little inappropriate, whether he’s got Dr. Dre’s blessing behind closed doors or not.
Needles to say, Sufian isn’t exactly hanging with Dre. His music falls squarely on the saccharine side of sappy: Love ballads that tell of the woes brought on by breaking up with his celebrity girlfriend, that kind of vibe. Before he became Spotify’s most streamed Malaysian singer, he was an English teacher in Johor.
His reaction to the backlash has been to keep the photo, and change the caption. It now reads this:
However, as of publication, he’s made no acknowledgement of his gaffe to his nearly 1 million followers, many of whom expressed their disappointment at the original caption. Observers are led to believe that either Sufian doesn’t understand the ramifications of using a derogatory term flippantly, or does understand, but would rather just brush the racism under the rug.
Racism cannot be hidden; where it’s buried, it will fester, and the next thing you know, pizza company CEOs are dropping N-bombs on conference calls.
So here, Sufian, maybe we can help if #WokeTwitter hasn’t already explained it to you. Maybe you don’t actually know why this is wrong, and it’s not just a flex: But it’s never OK to use the “n” word. It represents aforementioned centuries of oppression to a level — we are willing to wager — you have never experienced. It’s not just something cool to drop when you’re talking to your friends, and it’s especially not cool to “normalize” to your hundreds of thousands of followers.
If you’re still wondering about the relationship between African-Americans, and how their culture, humor, and terminology is appropriated without understanding — may we suggest as an intro this wonderful Dave Chappelle segment from Inside the Actor’s Studio.
