Radio counselor Dr. Laura Schlessinger
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The internet and the cable news channels have been all aflutter over the apparent racist rant of talk show radio host Dr. Laura Schlessinger.

In a nutshell Dr. Laura had a caller on her show who was offended that her husband’s friends used the N word around her. The caller is black and her husband is white.

You can listen to the audio or read the transcript here.

The first sentence on this site says this:

Dr. Laura Schlessinger launched into a racially charged rant…

I don’t know if Laura Schlessinger is a racist and there is no way to determine from the tape or the transcript if she is. She might not be the most gracious person and she certainly was rude to her caller, but that seems to be part of her schtick.  To me her repeating the N word over an over again was not a racially motivated rant. She was ranting about the caller’s sensitivity, and probably gunning for ratings.

I get what she was trying to articulate. We hear this offensive word all over the place, usually used by African American men. What the caller was trying to say was that she was offended by the use of the word regardless of who was using it and more to the point she was offended that her husband’s friends used it in front of her (or at all for that matter) and he did nothing to prevent it or defend her.

Two different things were going on.

Dr. Laura suggested the caller was hypersensitive and that if she was so sensitive and didn’t have a sense of humor she shouldn’t have married interracially. Which is probably what has gotten her into hot water more than saying the N word over and over.

Is the N word offensive? It depends on how it is used. To repeat the word as Dr. Laura did was not offensive. I agree with Dr. Laura that we hear it all the time from a particular group of people, rappers and comedians. This doesn’t make it okay, which is what the caller was trying to get at but Dr. Laura kept interrupting her.

They went on to discuss how race relations are worse now than they were before Obama was elected to office. I’m not sure that is true but our country certainly does have a racism problem and it needs to be discussed.

The problem is we can’t seem to have a discussion about racism without someone calling the other person a racist and that doesn’t get any of us anywhere. We can’t have this discussion and be politically correct at the same times. In order to get at the root of the problem people will have to state their fears and their truths and that scares a lot of people. Until we can discuss this without fear of retribution from the NAACP or Al Sharpton we aren’t going to move past this.


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