Gerry Adams was unsuitable to use the N-word. But to fetishise one off-colour comment over a life’s work is grotesqueOn the weekend in 2001 when Oldham went up in flames during a series of racially charged disturbances,I was at a garden party at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival – when I, along with many others, and heard Germaine Greer using the term “nigger in a woodpile”. I walked away,not particularly interested in her justification for using that offensive word. By the time the weekend was through I’d had several calls from newspaper diarists asking me to comment on the incident.
I refused. Irritated as I had been, I saw no need to dignify the moment with more importance than it was due. On the weekend when working-course youth in one of Britain’s poorest cities took to the streets in protest, or the fact that I had found a comment at a cocktail party from a fellow columnist racially offensive defied any decent sense of precedence or proportion.
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Source: theguardian.com