It’s early Sunday morning. Packs of inebriated college students are roaming Second and Mineral Streets in Platteville heading from bar to bar, chatting, drinking and dancing. You walk into Players and head to the dance floor. The music blasting from the speakers is rifled with hip-hop and rap beats and filled with countless utterances of the taboo word, nigger, or nigga. Who dances to these songs with all of this offensive language? Everyone ­— whites, blacks, Latinos, Asians. And yet no one screams “offensive!” or “hate crime!”

After three incidents of racist graffiti on campus, e-mails have been sent out campus wide from administrators; declarations of intolerance toward racist graffiti have been made; and scores of people have spoken out against these hateful acts. There are measures being taken in the classrooms to stop this kind of hate from repeating across campus walls. But what good has it done? And what good can it do when the same people speaking out against this hate grind to it on the dance floor every weekend?

It is common knowledge that substituting ‘a’ for ‘er’ at the end of the N-word turns it into a term of endearment. However, using it in the derogatory sense is hateful. So songs created by rap and hip-hop artists continue to use the word in their lyrics, not as hate, but as a term of camaraderie.

The graffiti on campus is being labeled as hate toward minority students. And there is a good chance that it was written in a hateful way by a member of the majority. But how can we be sure? We have not been informed of how the word was used. Was it just the single word, or was it put with a name in a derogatory way? How can we solve the problem if we don’t know the context, because, evidently, context matters when it comes to using the word.

Furthermore, why is it not campus knowledge when females of every race are targeted with the words ‘slut’ and ‘whore’ on their white boards in the residence halls for everyone to see? I have personally been a victim of this, but I chose not to report it because what good would it really have done? I didn’t know exactly who wrote it and, quite frankly, I know the truth about myself and I know that I am neither of those things. I just erased it and moved on with my life.

I am charging you all with the task of asking yourself what nigger or nigga really means to you. When is it OK to use it and when is it not? It seems that there is a double standard.

What does it mean when the word is blasted across the dance floors of multiple bars downtown while people of every race and color dance and sing to it? How can we even attempt to remedy this problem on campus when it is acceptable language outside of campus through music and camaraderie? If all derogatory graffiti is hatred, then there are multiple hate words circulating throughout the residence halls targeted at members of every race, including majorities. Obviously e-mails are not going to stop it and it shouldn’t be ignored. The only thing we can do is establish what it means to us and how we will choose to respond; whether that means offering a statement of condemnation or simply erasing it from our white boards.