Bill Maher 6/9/17

[Mr.Obvious]

Giving my two cents on this matter; Nigger seems a horrible, loaded term. Calling someone Nigger is just awful.
That being said... When talking about the word itself, I don't feel inclined to say: "The N-word is a bad word." I'll say: "Nigger is a bad word."
And that is because I believe the context of words is what gives it their meaning. Nor I, nor other people, should call anyone nigger. But I don't feel like saying nigger as I am doing now is bad because it's not 'aimed' at anyone. I'm not labeling anyone. I'm not insulting anyone. I'm talking about the verb itself.
Maher's joke, I guess, walks a line with that. In he doesn't talk about it without meaning, he uses the meaning, but he directs it at his own expense.  You could call that cheap. You could not think it funny. (I for one didn't think it was particularly funny, but hey.) But you can't say he directed it at anyone else as an insult, nor that it wasn't a joke. If aimed at anyone, it was at himself. He is at the bud of his own joke. If he were to call, I don't know, Obama for instance, a house nigger, in one of his jokes; that'd be different.
I didn't think it was a great joke. But I don't think he needed to apologize. I don't think he did anything wrong.

I agree, I think the sane can tell the difference between when a word is being used out of hate, when it simply said without thinking, and when it is used between those in on it done to endear. Bill is hardly a bigot or racist, it was simply not thought out.

Yes he should. And he did. 

Just a couple weeks ago, in my real personal life, I was at the local shopping center a few blocks from my house waiting for food outside a Chinese place. I started talking to an Asian guy who said his parents migrated to Hawaii and brought him there when he was a kid. Without thinking I said "You are a dreamer", that was a stupid remark on my part, because he very well could have had legal status. NO it was not racist on my part, but it was a case of me not thinking first. I saw him again two days ago at the same place, I apologized. "Dreamer" in any case is a term mostly used by Hispanics brought here undocumented. So it was still not a well thought out comment on my part.

But that's not really the same though, is it? I wasn't aware of the term Dreamer, but I can guess it's a slur in how you explain it. But you, while I'm sure you're not racist, called someone a dreamer. Maher didn't call anyone else a house nigger. If I understand correctly, you apologized because you felt bad about using a slur against someone and maybe made an assumption about him. Maher, however, used self-deprecation. Who does he have to apologize to? He didn't use it on anyone in particular. So who? The black community as a whole? If so, for what? The joke, whilst again not particularly funny in my book, only works because Maher feels that it's not okay to label someone with 'house nigger'. The message of the joke isn't that it's okay to use that term in regards to people. If anything it builds on the fact that we know it's not okay.

If I, for instance, make the joke: 'Q: What's the best thing about having sex with twenty-five year olds? A: That there's twenty of them.' This joke doesn't approve of pedophelia. It works on the fact that we are uncomfortable with pedophilia. It respects that we as a species don't like it and that's why it can shock us. In that way the joke doesn't build the message 'pedophilia is good', it builds the message 'pedophilia is bad'.