You are what you say.

People.

People irritate me. I irritate me, you irritate me, he/she/it irritates me, we irritate me, ya'll irritate me, they irritate me. Conjugate it all - it all irritates me. But I have a special loathing for those who - and this isn't my word - call themselves niggers.

OK, now that your brain has recovered from the fact that I used that word, pay careful attention. Just the fact that I used that word shocks you, I'm sure. It sends your brain back to Africa, back to the Civil War and Reconstruction, back to Jim Crow, segregation, White Primaries, Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks. And that is exactly what it should do. Such a word is dangerous. It carries with it connotations of extreme injustice, of hatred and prejudice. That word is in fact a weapon. And I hate using it, as should everybody. It is the absolute apex of offensive - I could call you a cunt, and you might grimace, but shrug it off. Call you a nigger? Them's fightin' words.

It is derived from the Spanish niger (black). This in itself is not surprising. It is its use in historical context that upsets people. Not too long ago it was, and sometimes still today it is used in a demeaning way to black people. It is also not a long shot to say it generally causes great reprisal from aforementioned group when it is said.

So why then do certain black people use this word? I'm sure you've heard it before. You step onto the train and hear a young black guy with his pants around his knees, a pristine baseball cap still bearing its advertising sticker, and a 4XL shirt you could probably stuff the entire population of Cyprus in proclaiming proudly, "Wassup, my niggah?"

What!? This word has seen perhaps two centuries of use as a racial slur, designed to ankle the black man, to put him down, and demean him. Why then do these black boys (and I avoid saying "men" intentionally) use it colloquially?

Let's take a gander at some popular black role models. Barack Obama and Colin Powell: great examples of political role models. Then you have Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks - the quintessential rights movement role models. Now let's try this...type "black role models" into google. First hit? RuPaul. RuPaul is a black man who dresses like a woman and is notoriously flamboyant. OK, fail there. Biggie Smalls. An obese man who rapped about money, objectifying women, cars, and "niggaz", killed by the guns of his rivals. Fail. O.J. Simpson. Famous football player who was involved in a stupefying debacle of a murder trial. Fail. Dennis Rodman. Famous basketball player who had a problem with drug abuse and domestic violence. Fail. Curtis Jackson a.k.a. "50 cent". Drug dealer turned rapper who was shot nine times and rapped about money, objectifying women, cars, and "niggaz". Tiger Woods. Famous golfer who cheated on his wife with an unknown amount of women and sucks at driving.

Are you seeing a pattern here?

Aside from RuPaul, who is only considered a black role model because he is crazy enough to keep landing in the media zoo, all of these black "role models" are rappers or sports stars. All of them are involved with either drug dealing, objectification of women, or violence. These men (and RuPaul) can all be found on the first page of said google search. This is what constitutes black role models? What rubbish.

Not to mention the fact that I can't think of a single rapper, or hip hop artist, or whatever you want to call it, that came after 1995 that doesn't include the word "nigga" in their music. Do these people realize that they are perpetuating the horrible negative stereotype of black people actually being niggers? You don't see white people entering a room full of white people going "wassup crackers/white boyz/pasty faces/barbarians". You don't hear Asians saying "wassup chinks" or Jews saying "wassup Auschwitzers". What's the deal!?

Maybe it is satire - like saying "hey fuckface/dicknose/douche nozzle". But this word is not even close to being reconciled that way. Why? I can't call anyone a nigga in the presence of a black person - I would get my pasty face creamed.

The thing that upsets me most about this, though, is not that I want to call people niggas and can't. It's that the continued use of this nasty word encourages prejudice to blossom. Think of the word as a pebble and society as a lake (let's use an already dead and beaten aphorism). Drop in the word, and small waves of prejudice radiate. Now take Lil Jon, Ludacris, Missy Elliot, Nas, Jay-Z, 50 Cent, Wu-Tang Clan, and all the other rappers out there and have them drop a pebble in each time they say it. You've taken what could be still waters and continued to froth and froth and froth, until they erode away the entire system that surrounds them.

To be fair, not all black people call each other this. I have found personally that the majority of black people who refuse to say this word are among the most intelligent, well-mannered, helpful, creative, interesting, and useful people I have ever had the privilege to know. I have also found that the people who say it all the time are the most irritating, stupid, incorrigible, worthless wastes of space who feel entitled to everything while earning nothing.

And so it seems to me, those who decide to continue to wield this weapon of language define themselves as such. Call someone a nigger? Then you are a nigger. Don't like it? Don't say it.

(I don't intend to be a hypocrite - I say it solely for the avoidance of the term "The N Word", which is just a pretty euphemism for the same idea.)

I do not feel a need to explain this.

Is anyone as fed up as I am of the current American system of employment?

You live your life when an American child, being carefree and having fun. Or, your parents were the cruel kind, and pushed you too hard to excel in an area, and now you're pigeonholed. Or, you were one of the lucky (or intelligent) ones, and you pulled ahead simply by the power of your own volition. Go you.

But you are the minority. How many other people do you know that can do handstands for thirty-seven minutes straight? Or can play Chopin's Fantasie-Impromptu? Or can pole vault to the surface of Uranus? Not many, I bet. I bet you know a bunch of people like me and my homies. Bright, generally upstanding people with a chip on their shoulder concerning hard work and authority.

And why not? American public schools teach more than just readin', ritin', and 'rithmetic. They teach you that everyone has their place in the pecking order - and teachers get, well, henpecked. I didn't attend private school; maybe private schools are full of well-adjusted children who listen to everything they are told, and teachers are allowed what children should actually be learning. So, I won't speak for them.

Public school, though, teaches poor little American children that being a teacher is basically a worthless profession where the only freedom one has is the adhesive used to stick the ubiquitous and vomit-inducing laminated three-color drawing of a smiling bespectacled worm halfway coming out of a similarly smiling apple. From the time I could I remember, I have overheard teachers complain about the idiotic standardized testing that "must" be inflicted upon their unwitting victims-I mean, students-in order to "prepare" them for the future.

Texas had TAAS, now TAKS, both mind-numbingly easy for any half-awake box turtle unable to kick his lifelong habit of methamphetamines. What do they teach us academically, and perhaps more importantly, what do they teach us about life? For the former, I will admit that I learned a few things. However, these things - such as simple multiplication, fractional equations, critical reading, and simple essay writing - should be learned by anyone ready to enter the human race as an adult. For the latter, these oh-so-important exams lay a groundwork of circumlocution, of fluff, of maximum reward for minimum effort.

All you have to do, little Billy, is tell me how to make a peanut butter sandwich, and you get a top score! Then, read this one-page story about how a cowboy fell off a horse, and tell me which paragraph tells about him falling off his horse...yes...good! You are sooooo smart, Billy! You get the rest of the day off while the remaining 45% of your class takes ALL FUCKING DAY to finish the same thing you finished in 15 minutes.

Butbut, there is a point to all of this, you say! This prepares us for the working world! And, sadly, you are absolutely right. All the person directly out of high school is expected to do is to count change from a cash register, lick envelopes, and hit rocks with hammers. Those who don't have the ability to do even these simple tasks are doomed to shrivel and die in a withering heap of idiocy. Right?

Wrong. To get ahead in the American working world, it is not about your ability. It is not about your talent, your intelligence, your willingness to work, your quick and critical thinking, your tenacity, creativity, enthusiasm, or any sort of thing you might imagine would pertain to having a successful vocation. No, to get ahead in the American working world, you must use what those little standardized tests taught you, but not in so many words - how to make believe you know everything, and get the people who are in control to believe you.

You see, the idea in American industry is not for the machine to work necessarily, but at all costs to evoke the idea of the machine working. Shit, we're America, right? We don't need to work that hard, everything will be fine. Just let it slide. And so CEOs hire idiot presidents and VPs that have the same friends as them. And the VPs hire idiot regional coordinators who they went to business school with. They got A's, I think. And the regional coordinators hire idiot branch managers, and in turn they hire idiot assistant managers, and so on. So by the time this huge snowball of poisonous nepotism and ineptness comes furiously hurtling toward the poor entry-level schmoe right out of high school, it doesn't matter how talented or able he might be - he has no choice but to be engulfed by the rampant flailing retardation of those who now control his fate.

And that is the real shame. Not only is all goodness quashed for the sake of getting more out of less, but those at the top basically run the lives of those at the bottom. Everyone needs to make money to survive. So you have to get a job, or become a thief, or don't shave for a few months and try your luck at joining a wolf pack. And, unless you are well-connected or a good bullshitter, all this shit rolls downhill. You will eat every single bit of it. A simple hiring or firing can leave you with less hours, and less money, and the inability to pay your rent or your bookies. And that's only one example.

You can have your pay cut because big boss decided it's not within the company's interest (anymore) to pay you what you worked your ass off earning. You can be written up for any old damn thing if the boss decides he doesn't like you. You can be given a shit schedule that you couldn't possibly follow for no reason other than "the company needs it".

Fuck a lot of that. I support being creative at work, and speaking up for yourself, regardless of the consequences. Don't let someone who may not be anywhere near your level decide how your life will be lived. Band together with lowlifes that share your point of view and tell your management just how you feel. You are stronger as a group.

In other words, eat your company's lunch, goddammit. You are working just as hard as they are.