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'Burial' tomorrow for word that stings

Youth group aims to make point

Nigger.

In just one day, can the word that has debased African-Americans for centuries be buried?

Elisha Morris says no. But the NAACP is willing to try, he said.

"Rome wasn't built in a day, nor did slavery end in one day. So this will take more than a day," said Morris, 50, youth adviser for the Philly chapter.

Tomorrow, the Philadelphia Youth Council of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People will hold a symbolic burial of the "N word" at 9:30 a.m. at Dobbins High School, 22nd Street near Lehigh Avenue.

Their mission: to push Philadelphians to permanently delete the word from their vocabulary.

Similar "funerals" already have taken place around the country.

Jacques Whaumbush, 17, president of the youth council, is optimistic that the program can get Philadelphians' attention.

"No one should use it because they have no right to it," he said.

The faux funeral will include all the trappings of a traditional burial: a casket, pallbearers, a hearse, solemn hymns, even a eulogy - to symbolize the word's death, he said.

Whaumbush admits he didn't always talk like a choir boy. The 12th-grader at Bishop McDevitt High School in Wyncote used to casually sprinkle his conversations with the word. His wake-up call came earlier this year, he said, during a "burial" at the NAACP regional conference, where he decided to get it out of his system.

He hasn't said it since.

Other youth-council members, more than 250 high school students, also have chosen to do the same. For them, the funeral is meant to be sorrowful - but also to celebrate the end of the use of the word, he said.

Blacks are no strangers to the word, and its tortured history - they were labeled with the word during slavery.

Nowadays, instead of hearing the inflammatory word spewing from the mouths of slave owners, it is generally used in greetings by people of all races and ages - and used often in hip-hop lyrics.

For some, the word no longer denotes the same negative meaning, but rather a cultural expression between friends.

That's what irks Jill Flowers, 39, and her husband Kovon, 37, creators of abolishthenword.com. The idea for the site struck the newlyweds from Brooklyn while listening to a radio show about the spread of the use of the word. The Flowers were dumbfounded at the time.

"People use it and they don't know the history behind it," said Kovon Flowers. He's a hip-hop fan; she isn't.

Their site has had nearly 13 million hits since it was launched last year, and the couple now offers wallet-sized educational cards with historic facts about the word, a contract urging people to stop saying it and a graphic slide show of lynching victims.

But not everyone believes abolishing the word will make a difference.

"The word is complicated," said Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy, author of "Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word," who opposes the witch hunt against the word.

"The word 'nigger' is all over, and is everything with the word supposed to be buried?"

He cited the controversial comedian Richard Pryor as one of his favorites - at least before Pryor swore he would never use the word after a trip to Africa in 1979.

The crude comic raised brows throughout most of his career with his racially charged language, often littered with the pejorative word. Kennedy thinks Pryor's sputtering of the word was genius.

Racism is the real culprit, and the word shouldn't be attacked, he said.

Some say the disparaging term is the most debated word in the English language, but Kennedy said it depends on how it's used. For some, it's simply a term of endearment.

"People may not like it if they hear a black man call another black man nigger, but does that mean it's self-hatred?"

Some argue that by replacing the 'er' at the end of the word with an 'ah' makes it acceptable.

But Morris, youth adviser of the Philadelphia NAACP, doesn't buy that argument.

"There's no way of making it into a good word," he said.

The word has wormed its way into literature and even the dictionary. Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn" mentions the word 215 times. Ironically, Richard Pryor was awarded the first-ever Mark Twain Prize for humor in 1998, seven years before he died.

"A black person" began the definition for the 'N word' in the Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary until the NAACP, among others, swayed lexicographers to change its definition, according to a Nov. 10, 1997, issue of Jet Magazine. Two years later, actor Damon Wayans attempted to trademark the word to put on clothes and other merchandise.

With a word so embedded in everyday language, some - like the two Flowers and Morris - are hopeful that it can be diminished, but for others like Kennedy, the jury is still out.

Morris is confident that people who attend will stop using the word.

However, if they don't, he said, "We're going to keep working on it until we get there." *