I have read NTSB air crash reports for decades...disasters are so rarely the result of just one mistake. And this is the same sort of thing. A series...and then lessons written in blood.

I had a friend who was a trained chemical engineer--he was always upset at BP's budgeting for maintenance and oversight. He felt they had a terrible history of accidents because they were always trying to cut it too close. That you just had to spend a certain amount of money to do chemical process and petrochemicals safely. He was right.

*promote
*quality

When Maher used it and Ice Cube came on to tell him how wrong he was I did sort of feel like its divisive power was perpetuated by the double standard it seemed to represent - black people can use it, white people can't. Honestly I thought it was all a bit hysterical (not hilarious), not that I doubted the authenticity of people taking offence, just that there was an obsession over the word rather then Maher's intent that only furthered the divide between black and white.

Now I think I missed the point. Naively I believed the end goal was to sterilize the word through usage, that the fact a word can cause offence is a sort of aberration. Recently I was made to understand that the word is venomous for good reason. It should be offensive because it represents not just a terrible history of slavery, but also of the continued oppression, both overt and insidious, that blacks experience.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and often I think that is how us whites use it. Mostly our intentions are good, we want to be part of that group... but we never will be because we will never experience that word the way a black man or woman will. I don't think I was a racist (well, so far as any of us are free from bias) when I used it before but I think it was ignorant and wrong of me. To only care for your own intent and ignore a word's symbolism is lazy and self interested.

I'd like a future where the word truly does lose contemporary meaning, but I don't think we get there by ignoring what it still represents to others.

$0.02

Well and of course we know #1 actually can be continued as for some reason there seemed to already be people there.

So in fact they probably found it first a LONG time ago up by Alaska's volcanic chain via the Russia/Alaska land-bridge that would have existed there for a time; plus someone would have to fill me in but I'm not entirely sure where the Polynesians "may" fit into all of this--as I know they were also known to be GREAT seamen and went very far on extremely small vessels (the ones I'm thinking of you actually have your legs in the water and it carries about six people and is designed sort of like an odd Catamaran)--Hawaii for example was settled into by 300-500 CE. Then the Vikings in Greenland, Canada, and North America (I think just Maine and a few points in Newfoundland--they also didn't stick around for long in these areas as they left these "western" camps to go back to Greenland for the winter). Finally, Columbus made it who sailed around The Caribbean a bit (basically Cuba then Haiti I think; if I remembered right--after coming from the Canary Islands).

There may even be more history to it as unfortunately we know how history is written AND if you don't have that much of a language and worse no paper or way to reference or keep track of old material, telling your story becomes VERY hard as it was never recorded in the first place. All we have left is archeology to help guide us to these newer, more exact figures and finders.

BUT, Columbus did find the first real trade route for 15th century Europe to a "New World", one that had its own spices and plenty of bounty, and THAT is what meant everything. THIS is what people should remember, not that he found it first or the round Earth garbage--that is just bad teachers and even worse (as I READ THEM) terrible history books!