Are Dr. Laura’s ratings so bad she had to reach for N-word?

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I never liked “Dr. Laura” to begin with, but it seems that her reaching for the N-word must be a last ditch effort to boost her ratings? I don’t know.

I stopped to think about the first time that I ever heard the word.

I grew up in a farm town in north central Ohio where the only African Americans to visit the place came through at the host of Quakers as part of the Underground Railroad during the Civil War. The closest thing that I saw to a black child was Little Black Sambo eating pancakes, or the Aunt Jemima cookie jar on the kitchen table.

I saw the first person of a different race, a woman from Japan, who visited the Methodist Church and who taught all of the mothers how to make Sukyaki. This was a big deal because many men in the community had only recently returned from duty in Japan following WWII.

In the late 1950s, my family traveled to Southern Virginia to visit great grandparents. Along the way, it was quite common to see signs at restaurants and public toilets denoting “colored,” or “no colored.” As a young boy I asked my Mother and Dad to explain this.

They said that some people don’t like colored people. We are not those people, my Mother said emphatically. She went on to explain that at Great Grandpa’s and Grandma’s house, there are coloreds and Indians. Mother said, they have always lived with us.

Digging deeper into history, of course, my family had slaves and they occupied lands that once belonged to Native Americans. As it was explained to me, even before the Civil War, one of my grand ancestors decided that the farm would operate more as a collective where everyone worked together and shared what they had. Therefore, there were houses for coloreds, Indians, and the family. That is how I found it when I first arrived as a small boy.

No one said, “Stay away from the coloreds and the Indians.” In fact, Mom took us around to meet the people she knew well while growing up there.

She admitted that there was some Indian blood in the family, though it was up to my own ancestry investigation that I discovered African Americans in the tree too. Now, I am kind of proud to be one of those mixed up American families.

Anyway, back in Ohio, it wasn’t in the rural farm community that I heard racial slurs and bigoted “jokes.” It was in Columbus Ohio while I was in Junior High School. One of my friends was part white and African American. When he got angry, sometimes he would call me the n-word. That didn’t make sense to me, and I didn’t like it.

During the Civil Rights movement years, race was the dominant topic and you heard all kinds of talk in public places, among students, and such. My Mother had zero tolerance for name calling of any kind. So, it was never an acceptable thing to do, no matter what the words are.