A colleague of mine, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel columnist Eugene Kane, is on what has all the markings of a quixotic mission. He wants to bring a “ban the N-word” campaign to Milwaukee public schools.

Right now though, it seems like the black students he’s encountered so far aren’t having it.

Kane wasn’t just prompted to start this sorely-needed consciousness-raising by Michael Richards’ rant, but by a white teacher who was struggling to get her black students to stop using the word.

In the world of surreal twists, that beats all.

Yet sadly enough, when Kane tried to educate her students on the awfulness of the N-word, they shot back defenses that made them seem dumber than the Jim Crow racists of the 1960s who spelled it as “Nigers” on their protest signs.

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Among other things, they insisted the word doesn’t mean the same as it used to mean in the past. Some even said they wouldn’t care if a white person used it -- a statement I sense wasn’t made out of sincerity as much as it was made to defuse Kane’s argument and have the last word. One girl, Kane wrote, vigorously stood up for the N-word because, she said, it doesn’t mean anything to them to say it.

Problem is, it ought to mean something. And the fact that it doesn’t mean anything to these young black people, the fact that they are so adamant about defending their own degradation rather than question what they are buying into, is frightening.

But in fairness to them, I think part of the reason for their defense of the N-word -- besides immaturity -- has to do with how cultural conditions are causing too many young black people to confuse adaptability with strength.

Unfortunately, things like the N-word -- as well as other assorted forms of negativity -- that they’ve co-opted aren’t necessary for them to survive in a white-run society, but making it tougher for them to do so.

Think about it.

Think about, for example, the willingness of many young black people to embrace things that glorify prison culture. Besides wearing low-slung pants that reveal underwear and buttocks cracks -- a style worn by inmates who aren’t issued belts and to send signals of sexual availability -- there are the rap magazines that celebrate imprisoned “soldiers.”  Thing is, though, these soldiers weren’t incarcerated because they were fighting some grave injustice, but rather, because they committed some senseless -- and usually violent -- act.
 
No wonder the kids are confused.

And none of this can just be shrugged off as a trend similar to trends that black youths followed in the 1960s and 1970s. Back then, when we wore Afros and dashikis, we did it because of the black power movement that said we shouldn’t be ashamed to celebrate our natural hair and our African heritage. That trend was born out of pride. The trend to emulate criminals is born out of pathology. It doesn’t celebrate anything except nihilism and negativity.

Just like the N-word.

In spite of their defenses of that word, however, Kane said he had hope for the students. So do I. Among other things, I hope they pick up a black history book or two, grow up, and realize that just because one does something all the time doesn’t make it right, and that they have a duty to scrutinize their own habits and even unlearn them.

I’ve had to do that myself. 

But in any case, the black students who defended their use of the N-word to Kane got me to thinking not just about that word, but about how our lowering of our standards in many areas of our lives is killing us. Perhaps one place to start to reverse this trend lies with diffusing notions that adaptability always equals strength. Many times, strength means having the courage to either change the things that are bad, or reject them and leave them at the door.

Not bring them inside.