I told them they can't say his name, that it makes me want to puke. So they agreed to refer to him as "higa."

Personally, I'd love for the word to have no power.

ABG: "I love Spike and believe that his mark on our culture is vastly underrated, but he too comes from a generation where nuance with respect to these sensitive matters could not be tolerated."

... Spike Lee's generation actually lived through the civil rights battles as youngsters, rather than viewed them as younger generations might today as part of stock video footage about 1950's and '60s Americana. As such, the difficulties and traumas of those times obviously remain a very vivid memory to Lee and his contemporaries, and their own views on such "sensitive matters" were hardened by those times.

My mother has told us the story of her own race-based experience in late 1950s Jacksonville, North Carolina (home of the USMC's Camp LeJeune) as the young 20-something Marine Corps officer's wife from Southern California. While she was waiting at the train station with my older sister and brother to go to D.C., my sister had to go to the bathroom, and so my mother impulsively decided to make a public social statement of her own about segregation in the South, by taking her children into the women's restroom clearly marked "Colored Only." Needless to say in retrospect, this was indeed a very big faux pas for white people back then. (This incident occurred three years before I was born.)

Upon exiting the "Colored Only" restroom with my sister, she was physically confronted by several menacing local white policemen and threatened with arrest for disturbing the peace and disorderly conduct. As it was, she and my siblings were taken to the police station, thus missing their train.

My father and his commanding officer were then both summoned there to pick them up and take them home -- but not before everyone received a great big lecture from the local police captain about the necessity of military folks respecting local customs, statutes and ordinances, all in the spirit of continued military-civilian cooperation.

Given that I had no first-hand experience with those times, I have no real idea what my mother must have been feeling at that particular moment, even though she told us that she was scared out of her mind and second-guessing her own impulsive bravado, thinking that she had unwittingly placed her own two small children in harm's way.

I would offer that people who got caught up in those turbulent times didn't necessarily have the luxury of "nuance" back then. And we should remember that, and cut them some slack.

As it stands today, my mother's own views about using the word "ni**er" are hardened and not unlike shoephone's, in that she considers the word to be a terribly vulgar obscenity, and thus not to be used under any circumstance in our everyday world.