In Defense of Racism?

A couple of days ago, I blogged about Greg Howard, the teacher in Florida who asked his students what “change” stood for in relation to the Obama campaign and proceeded to write out the acronym “come help a n****r get elected.”

That same day, Kevin Fischer over at Right View Wisconsin posted an entry blasting teachers for engaging in pro-Obama activities on school time. I posted a link to the story of Greg Howard to make the point that teachers on both sides of the political spectrum are engaging in questionable behavior, with the following comment:

What’s even more disgusting is teachers who engage in politics in their classrooms and use the “N” word in the process

After my comment, readers of RVW were quick to defend the use of the “N” word as being perfectly acceptable (emphasis mine):

I’d say equally disgusting since we don’t know what the pro-BO teachers are calling McCain-Palin.

Why can’t you say nigger? My black friends and co-workers do. Young black men don’t seem to give 2 shits about it.

Not to be outdone, “Steve T.” of RVW posted a series of links to news stories dealing with the use of the “N” word. Now I’m not sure if Steve posted the links in an attempt to justify white folks using the “N” word to describe African-Americans, but if he did, he wasn’t successful, because many of the stories Steve linked to make it clear that the use of the “N” word is just not acceptable.

Now I don’t know whether some of the folks over at RVW are actually racist or not; I’d prefer to believe they just don’t understand the issue as well as they’d like to think.