How could you be so out of touch? How could you act as if simply ignoring this issue makes you a bigger person when blood has been spilled for all this word represents? Do you actually believe people have issue with this word for nothing, or does it make more sense that its all about its history and what it represents as a whole?

I don’t believe that I am out of touch. Blood is spilled over ideals and principles, never for words. A word is just that, a word. I think that people attach to much to these words, slavery wasn’t caused by the words nigger or Negro, or wasn’t perpetuated by them either. I think some people cling to their versions of these words because they want to feel anger and hatred, and because they want to hold something over the white people.

The first emancipated slaves called themselves Negroes, they could have called themselves whatever they wanted to but they chose Negro. What right have we, hundreds of years after the fact, who, in our comfy existence have no real concept of slavery, discrimination and hardship, to decide that that particular word is wrong and bad. Ignorance doesn’t cut it either, Ignatius Sancho was far better educated than I am today, yet he too used the word to refer to himself. If they believed that it was good enough for them, I don’t think that I have the right to disagree, after all they went through slavery, not us.

Our ancestors used this word for two centuries to describe themselves, now it seems that the meaning has changed, or been corrupted and we are not allowed to use it, apparently because of slavery or other brutality, but surely that brutality was far more raw right after slavery? Yet our ancestors used it anyway.

You say people have issue with it, and mention the blood spilled and so forth, but what about people like Spike Lee using it as a stick to beat white people with? Saying “That was his version. The Negro version did not exist,”

Nigger though is different. I believe that this has been over used for various things and I don’t think we can ever reclaim that word in the same way. Even I have a strange reaction to that word, I know I shouldn’t, it’s just a word, and worse it is one that I was rarely called as a child growing up in white Britain. I was far more often called ‘Sambo’, ‘Wog’, ‘Nig Nog’, ‘Coon’, ‘Jungle Bunny’, etc yet ‘Nigger’ is the only one that draws this kind of reaction from me and I have to wonder about that as it never used to, and I certainly never felt it was any worse than the others.

Again this seems to be used in some quarters as a stick to beat white people with. Only blacks can use this word, and the black youth today use it as often as possible it seems, yet white people cannot use it even in debate (which makes me wonder what white people do at Karaoke or when singing to themselves?). I despise this and the position it puts me in, if I hear a black person on the bus use it I am meant to accept that, but if a white person uses it I am meant to be angry. I don’t like that. Either we are equal or we are not. If I heard a white person use it I wouldn’t bat an eyelid. But if anyone aimed it at me, white or black, I would probably be angry, but not because of the history of the word, or how it has been used to refer to me throughout my life, but because of its modern usage.

There is a lot of shared baggage that comes with the word between Europeans and Africans, and no educated man could ignore this fact. My question to Mr. Ignatius Sancho is how do Africans loose anything by fighting these labels? No one is searching for labels, but we are fighting them. Nigger, Negro, and even some say African are labels that are not our own, so you are incorrect in claiming that we have lost something by dropping the word Negro to describe ourselves.

Negro describes a color or state of being, and not a people or a land mass. There is no Negroland, or Niggerica on any map. In Spanish we are called Moor or Maurina, and there was never any need for Negro.

How could you be so out of touch? How could you act as if simply ignoring this issue makes you a bigger person when blood has been spilled for all this word represents? Do you actually believe people have issue with this word for nothing, or does it make more sense that its all about its history and what it represents as a whole?

At the end of the day it is just a word that means black, the slavery element to it has been attached much later in my view, indeed as a boy it wasn’t uncommon for black people to describe themselves as Negroes or niggers, long before the likes of rappers and their ilk.

I think it is a shame that we allowed negative feelings over a word (and it’s associated word negro) to lead us to abandon it, now we are the losers constantly striving to find the right label for ourselves, when we had it all along.

Please tell what is your take on this theory.

The Republican party has made it their business to try and confuse the two (real issues vs. religion), and people seem to actually fall for it. As long as a candidates views doesn’t actually stop you from practicing your religion personally there should be no reason to vote in such a way that would hold up progress on issue’s that are important to everyone and not just a minority who so happens to be Christians.

I am not sure if Barrack Obama is willing to bring about the change he claims he can if he does manage that task it won’t be based on his religious views totally, because he will have to face many types when going abroad. Many of whom will would care less if he is a Christian, because those tactics will only work here! In an Islamic State you can give that up, the Russians could care less, and religion is not as big in issue in the UK either.

To the world the issues matter, and the USA does not encompass the whole world. So we better play catch up, and stop these silly religion games while loosing potential great leaders in the process.

Also, according to the wikipedia.com data given you failed to mention that it states there is a change coming, because based on growth many people are becoming Atheist and non-denominational. And large numbers of Christians are starting to become mere Christian sympathizers, and the growth of these change range from 69.1 to 105.7% for the other as compare to only 5.3% becoming Christian. So if this is the projection it looks like Christian churches are barely growing, and merely holding their current numbers.

So as things change in America we will see what the outcome of this is, and hopefully we can stop the madness.

The one fact I will give you is that this country is approx 80% Christian: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States
Because of this one fact, that is why religion becomes an issue. Its because of this is why Christianity is the national religion although not technically stated. Most Christians want the same as them in the office of President because they believe that this person will have the same idea system and is supposed to put into practice what they believe is morially correct. Also this county is approx 75% white. Again, this is why the president has been white. I understand that these are stereotypical statements I am making but, the bottom line is that people gravitate to like people. If your a criminal you gravitate to criminals.

The reason why Osama being a Muslim became an issue is because of the whole “Terrorist theory”. And I call it a theory, but that’s a whole other conversation.

Anyway to answer questions:

1. It is possible for someone other than a Christian to be a good president. It just won’t happen until the majority of voters are not Christian. People want what is like themselves, period.

2. We can vote for someone who is not Christian. Now whether there have been candidates that were not Christian, I don’t know. Probably not.

Can only Christians contribute to this society without bringing fears that they are trying to bring America to its knees? Well this question is confusing to me. We all contribute to society whether we want to or not. Beit good or bad. Fears in a person are placed there not by the external force of how I behave but by what is in that person. You choose how you feel in any situation. Bringing America to its knees. We’re doing that all by ourselves. I don’t think Christianity has anything to do with that. I believe it is human nature to be destructive. And it takes a higher force, for me it’s Jesus, to keep a person in line.