I made the mistake a few days ago of turning the channel to CNN only to find Dr. Laura Schlessinger discussing with Larry King her recent, repeated use of the "n-word" on the radio and her subsequent decision to end her show. She explained her decision this way:

Voice of dissent? How noble! Against what, exactly?

The most immediate problem with this statement, of course, is her utter failure to comprehend the First Amendment. The First Amendment does not grant you the right to say whatever you want (even if it’s in your mind and in your heart!) in a public forum without any repercussions whatsoever or prevent your show/sponsors from being boycotted by groups or individuals. Any such policy would, in fact…wait, for it… violate the First Amendment, which does prevent the government from restricting your right to free speech in a public forum. So, Dr. Laura’s hunt for her alleged “First Amendment rights” is likely to be as meaningful and fruitful as O.J.’s ongoing search for the “real killer.”

Unsurprisingly, no one demonstrates a complete lack of understanding the First Amendment more than the former Governor of Alaska and Vice Presidential Candidate (think about that for just a moment... that's enough), Sarah Palin, who chimed in with the eloquent tweet:

Remember, folks, it’s neither American nor fair to openly criticize racism.

More maddening, however, is Schlessinger’s refusal to understand basic American history. And so it is worth going through a brief refresher:

Modern scientists and social theorists understand race as a social construction lacking any biological basis. Historians, too, have found repeatedly that what we have come to call “race” did not, in fact, exist in the earliest days of the American colonies. Colonial Virginia, for instance, originally had both white and black unfree laborers, who often served as indentured servants. There is, in fact, a famous record of one African indentured servant fulfilling the terms of his contract, acquiring land, and owning servants of his own.

Over time, however, this labor model became problematic. Land was scarce and servants fulfilling their indenture demanded more and more of it. The end result, as Edmund Morgan demonstrated decades ago, was rebellion. The elite responded to the rebellion with be a series of slave codes that would increasingly codify slavery with blackness and visa versa. Poor whites would now identify with the ruling class precisely because they, simply by being white, were “free” as opposed to blacks who were necessarily enslaved.

Enter the Declaration of Independence: “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” The hypocrisy of this sentiment was not lost on the founding generation. Jefferson, in particular, struggled with the inherent contradiction between authoring the mellifluous phrase and owning (and impregnating) slaves. And so it is here, ironically, in the climate of the revolution that racism comes into being. It was the need to justify bondage in a nation that proclaimed universal liberty. If African Americans were said to be inherently inferior, their inferior economic and social position could be justified. And so emerged during this time an industry of scientific and Biblical justifications for slavery and racism.

The word “nigger” served an integral part of this process. By the nineteenth-century, the word had become both entirely pejorative and pervasive. As law professor Randall Kennedy summarizes, the word would come to accompany “innumerable lynchings, beatings, acts of arson, and other racially motivated attacks upon blacks. It has also been featured in countless jokes and cartoons that both reflect and encourage the disparagement of blacks. It is the signature phrase of racial prejudice.” It was a term used not only to disparage African Americans, but to mark them as a separate and distinct from whites—indeed, from humanity itself—and therefore unworthy of freedom. The word would outlast slavery, becoming central to life not only in the Jim Crow South but, as David Roediger has shown in The Wages of Whiteness, in northern cities as well, where working-class whites needed constantly reinforce their own whiteness.

So Dr. Laura, like many white people before and after her, misses the deep historical meaning inextricably attached to a white person using the word—not because African Americans and “liberals” want to keep race alive after the Civil Rights Movement "killed it"—but because race “exists” as a result of four-hundred years of American racism that simply cannot be erased and is not dead. African Americans use the word (“on HBO” or otherwise) in an ironic way, in an attempt to re-appropriate the word and shift its meaning away from denigration and toward one of camaraderie and support. Certainly, not all African Americans support using the word in this context or think about it with this kind of intentionality, but that is where the root of this impulse lies. The real question in this whole debacle is why any white person would, knowing this history, ever want to use the word in the first place.

But the entire debate is a microcosm of a larger phenomenon that seems to have taken contemporary American politics by storm: why do so many white people all of a sudden feel oppressed, like they are victims of "reverse racism"? Why is Glenn Beck convinced, seemingly without any basis at all, that Barack Obama has a “deep-seated hatred for white people or white culture”? Why do off-the-cuff and out-of-context remarks by Shirley Sherrod or Sonia Sotomayor become enormous political scandals and, apparently, evidence that white people are the real victims of racial discrimination? Why is the inability to say the deeply hurtful pejoratives with long histories of violence attached to them without angering people suddenly a violation of basic rights? What the fuck is up with this guy? White people’s recent obsession with, and politicization of, their own alleged oppression is one of the most interesting, perplexing, and problematic trends in recent American history and it needs an explanation.