Loyal serfs of the Bipolar kingdom know that I frequently employ self-censorship in my blog articles here.  Just the other week, I called Dubya Bush a “bleep,” and to be honest, the word “bleep” has taken on so much of its own power that I don’t even know what word I intended to censor out.

With that in mind, should I ever have to censor myself if the word in question was “negro”?

MJS Columnist Patrick McIlerhan, not black, didn’t even use the word in his recent post about the subject.

So, don’t say “n***o” if you’re a conservative politician. Conservative pundit, either, I assume. I don’t know what I’ll do if I ever have to write a column about the United You-Know-Who College Fund’s inaugural gala.

That’s definitely the first time I’ve seen “n***o” with more asterisks in it than Wisconsin Avenue.

Should whiteys be able to use it?

Here’s one side to the coin.  The “United Negro College Fund.”  If I’m white, and I want to donate to it, I should be able to, right?  Why should I be able to donate to something but not even say its title out loud?

Here’s the other side to the coin.  The (gasp) Wikipedia side:

Now it is often considered an ethnic slur although the term is considered archaic and is not common as a racist slur.

Oh, come on!  Everything becomes an ethnic slur eventually!  “Colored” used to be polite!  “Negro” took “colored” over as the polite term:

“Negro” superseded “colored” as the most polite terminology, at a time when “black” was still generally regarded as negative

Eventually, it seems, just about everything becomes politically correct.  Call it the slippery-slope of white guilt.

Maybe the problem isn’t with the word itself, but the need to label, which comes from both sides (racist whiteys and racist, uh, non-whiteys?).  Of course, the more we pay attention to it, it seems, the longer the labels seem to stay.

Hmmm.  Maybe I should have written about how man-made global warming’s being exposed as a fraud instead.