Comic Paul Mooney used to joke in his routine that he uttered the "N-word" 100 times every morning.
"Well, white folks, you shouldn't have ever made up the word," Mooney, who is black, says in promotional material. "... I say nigga 100 times every morning; it makes my teeth white."
But on Monday, Mooney pledged never to use the word again after seeing a video of white comedian Michael Richards, who used the word -- and other slurs -- to denounce hecklers at a recent performance captured on video.
"I've used it and abused it, and I never thought I'd say this," Mooney said, but Richards "is my Dr. Phil -- he's cured me."
Mooney, whose career credits include writing for the late Richard Pryor and the TV show "In Living Color," joined Monday with African American leaders including the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) in calling for rap stars, hip-hop artists and everyone else to stop using the offensive word. They endorsed an NAACP campaign to "just say 'no' to the N-word."
"We're not trying to penalize anyone," Waters said at a news conference at the Los Angeles Sentinel newspaper, "but don't use the N-word, no matter who you are, whether you're black, white, young or old."
Jackson added: "This word is a symbol of degradation and the actions that flow from it."
Young people and nonnative English speakers hear the songs and raps and don't recognize how offensive the word is to some, the African American leaders contend.
It isn't clear whether rappers and hip-hop artists -- many of whom are African American -- will comply. Several musicians and their agents couldn't be reached for comment.
Some who have studied its usage argue that banning the word -- used more than 200 times in "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," for example -- goes too far.
The term was originally "simply a dialectal variant of Negro," according to Webster's New World College Dictionary, and now "is acceptable only in black English.... It is now generally taboo because of the legacy of racial hatred that underlies the history of its use among whites and its continuing use among a minority of speakers as a viciously hostile epithet."
But in the way that some other derogatory words have been embraced by the groups they once derided, the word has become almost a term of endearment or empowerment when used among individuals in certain contexts, says Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy, who is African American and wrote the book "Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word."
