The word nigger has many facets of use. One use that has some people scratching their heads is its use in rap, especially gangsta rap.

Its use is not just in music; it can be found quite often in any Quentin Tarantino 90s-style action-comedy-thriller and “Def Comedy Jam” on HBO.

This has given rise to a debate which is not black vs. white (amazingly enough), but a debate which is primarily between older black people and young America, mostly young blacks.

Before I go any further, I do think we shouldn’t hide important issues under the rug by using politically correct phrases such as African American. A black person is black and a white person is white. It’s simple, and that’s the way we did it in the all-green Army I used to be in.

(Not everyone starts out at PCU.)

Also, I don’t think I should hide my words by putting cute, little quotes around the word nigger. That’s like pretending I’m not saying the word, and you all are adults here and can handle it.

Some say the use of the word nigger, especially in the media, desensitizes it. Using it strips it of its ability to hurt, they say, especially when blacks utter it in the presence of whites.

Others, primarily blacks who were members of the generation who worked for civil rights during the time of Martin Luther King Jr., say the term represents years of indignities that were forced upon blacks.

Using it only trivializes what the word nigger has meant, and still means, in America, they say.

Kris Parker, a rap artist known as KRS-One, said the word will be deracialized by its increasing use and become just another word.

“In another 5 to 10 years, you’re going to see youth in elementary school spelling it out in their vocabulary tests,” he said.

The Rev. Benjamin F. Chavis Jr., a longtime civil rights leader, said, “The term made us less human, and that is why we must reject the usage of that term.”

I was raised in a household where we didn’t say the word unless it was in the sense that I am using it here.

But I’d go to school in tiny, little, hick Pomeroy where some of the kids made racist comments quite often. Not cool. Many of them still acted like little kids when they got into high school. The racist kids usually had poor parents and now work at crappy jobs without an education. I don’t go back to Pomeroy these days, anyway. My old friends don’t live there anymore.

Then I went to be all I could be in the army. Prior to that I had only had met blacks while playing basketball at the Fort Dodge YMCA and the Fort Dodge military recruiting office.

In the army I met several blacks. Race was not a problem and when people fought it was usually because someone’s fart stunk.

I was in the 82nd Airborne at Fort Bragg, N.C., where blacks were a significant population off-base as well as on — unlike Iowa State.

Black people called each other nigger all the time. And, although the word is considered taboo to many whites, some whites began calling some blacks nigger and they’d call us cracker. It became a running joke.

The words didn’t mean jacks—t except as a statement by the men about how stupid racism is. We began to create new words to use including Roots (like the book) and Frosty (like the snowman).

This cracker went to war with some of those niggers in the Persian Gulf. The word was totally desensitized by both races.

I doubt I’ll ever find an environment that open and equal about race. I guess we were all brothers in arms.

I’m probably going to be hated now by gobs of people on this campus, black and white, for saying these words in my column, but I’d rather not let a word stand in the way of equality.

If the word nigger is used in its derogatory context then, of course, it’s wrong.

But it is true equality when race is no longer an issue and is reduced (or perhaps raised) to humor which makes fun of how silly racial hatred really is.

I’d like to see a time when we no longer have to run stories about race in newspapers, but as long as we make it an issue, it will be in the papers.

If we work to desensitize things that separate whites and blacks from reaching equality, then Martin’s dream just may be reached.

Tim Frerking is a senior in journalism mass communication from Pomeroy.