Well, it took about ten days, but finally the phrase “nappy headed hos” is funny and a viable punch line.

On April 4 Don Imus mumbled the phrase when speaking about the Rutgers Women’s Basketball team. It was over in about 1.1 seconds and then the sound of his garbled, old-man voice muttering those words disappeared into the atmosphere where now, going by the speed of sound, those words are approximately 293,760,000 million miles away–or 3 times the distance that exists between between the Earth and Sun.

But as Hans Solo and C3PO are just now hearing Imus say “nappy headed hos” in a galaxy far, far away, we’ve heard it about thousand additional times.

We’ve heard Matt Lauer say it and we’ve heard Al Sharpton say it. We’ve heard our local news anchors say it and we’ve heard the deli guy say it. Its been said for 10 days at water coolers all across the country. We’ve heard white people say it and we’ve heard black people say it and now we may hear someone in the Dagobah system say it.

The point is, its been heard so much over the past ten days that it hardly means anything anymore. We’ll be seeing it on t-shirts, as a name of a band and countless guys have probably already renamed their fantasy baseball teams “The Nappy Headed Hos.” Google gives you about 2,370,000 results when you search for “nappy headed hos”!

Instead of condemning it and moving on, we’ve harped on it. We’ve repeated the phrase to the point that we don’t mind the phrase anymore–in fact, we may start hearing it on the street and in our music. We may start to use “nappy headed ho” as a term of endearment.

If a word or phrase is so hurtful and so damaging then stop saying it. Stop drawing attention to it. And, above all, stop introducing to people who haven’t heard it yet.