I'm sure the old guard NAACP'ers will consider this a victory in the fight for bourgeois decency. Me? Not so much.
Eddie Griffin thought he'd shock the swells at a big Black Enterprise event over the weekend by littering his act with N-words, but the comic was the one who got the real jolt when the mag's owner gonged his routine, and tossed him off the stage!You could look at this two ways. Griffin, speaking at a corporate sponsored event, should have known much better than using the word "nigga" (sorry, why even bother dressing it up as "The N-Word"? It still means the same thing.) in front of such a stuffy audience. Maybe a comedic genius like Dick Gregory could have gotten away with it, but a minstrel like Griffin, who wasn't funny before Undercover Brother, and hasn't been funny since, can't pull off such a stunt.
Rev. Al Sharpton tells TMZ that Griffin took the stage as the headliner and did his best Michael Richards impression, blistering the mostly African-American crowd with a barrage of N-bombs, and wailing, "Why are some black leaders telling us to stop using the N word?"
Griffin's mike was promptly cut, and Black Enterprise owner/publisher Earl Graves stomped on stage and proclaimed, "We ... will not allow our culture to go backwards ... We will pay Mr. Griffin all that we owe him but we will not allow him to finish the show if that's the way he's going to talk." Oh, snap!
The crowd gave Graves a standing ovation -- and Rev. Al, speaking the next day at the event, gave Graves props for his axing of Griffin. A rep for Griffin had no comment.
On other hand, who the hell did Earl Graves and Company think they were hiring? Byron Allen? Wayne Brady? Sinbad? By going for a "name" instead of using common sense, they first put themselves in a trick bag, and then want to proclaim themselves as some sort of victors in the annals of Black Crusading.
Making a mistake isn't a victory. Admitting one, which Graves has yet to do, is.
Negroes please!
By failing to exercise even a nominal amount of common sense, both sides make themselves look like pure ingrates. In this post-Imus world, such oversensitivity only undermines legitimate pushes for more decent media representations of black culture.
Reginald Lewis and Red Foxx crying inside.
Griffin Dropped for Dropping N-Bomb
