During a recent impromptu debate about the n-word on ABC’s The View, co-host Whoopi Goldberg remarked that blacks and whites live in “different worlds.” She used that rationale to justify her assertion that it is okay for blacks to use the n-word but not acceptable for white people to use that degrading racial epithet. First of all, I don’t believe anyone should be using it, but that’s beside the point here. The real point is that, by claiming blacks and whites live in different worlds, Goldberg is summarily dismissing Martin Luther King’s ideal of equality of the races. He championed the goal of a colorblind society with no barriers or divisions between the races.
Ms. Goldberg, on the other hand, seems to be okay with the doctrine of separate but equal, a dogma that was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896, but struck down by its Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954. Of course, the argument back then was over schools. Goldberg wants to consign blacks to entirely separate world from whites. But the concept is still the same – separate is inherently unequal. How can one say he or she supports racial justice with a mentality like that? Goldberg is doing a great disservice to Americans of all races.
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