On Sunday, the self-described "Queen of Mean," standup comedian Lisa Lampanelli, tweeted a photo of herself and Girls lightning rod Lena Dunham. The caption referred to Dunham as Lampanelli's "nigga":
So that was stupid.
Given Dunham's reputation for racial insensitivity, Lampanelli could be going for irony. The comedian herself is openly insensitive in such linguistic matters — "I get to say the 'n-word' on stage and get paid money," she has bragged. The majority of the "Comedy" section of her Wikipedia is devoted to her racial humor and use of slurs. This is what she is building her legacy on.
The same could be said for rapper Azealia Banks, who resumed offending last week after a January Twitter spat found her calling Perez Hilton a "messy faggot." Another argument with Hilton erupted over her pulled remix of "The Harlem Shake," she called him a "faggot" again, people got pissed and that led to some semantic chin-stroking on Banks' part:
Banks has since lashed out at the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, which criticized her use of the epithet, in a virtually incoherent rant that does nothing for her case:
I have sex with men and women, do I have to take a picture of my licking a fucking pussy? What the fuck! It doesn't make any sense. It's so stupid. It's so stupid and it's so evil. And it's just like this stupid fucking media shit, you know what I mean? It's the media shit. And this is why I go about myself the way the way I go about myself, and I do whatever the fuck I want. If the media is going to build me up to tear me down, you motherfuckers are not going to tear me down.
I just make these fucking raps, and I'm just gonna wear these outfits, and fucking live my life. I can't deal with you motherfuckers, I don't have time for this shit.
Whatever the intent, whatever the bigger picture, whatever you want to express and explore about terms that are not technically yours to reclaim, there are certain words that are too distracting for people to see past. For an increasingly sensitive public, especially one as reactive as the online public, these stick out like darts on a low-character platform like Twitter. To use them, often, is to speak to be unheard, to get in the way of your own ideas, if you have any ideas in the first place.
So just don't. Unless you are a troll. In which case, congratulations: you're a troll.