Cool Steve Archives - From Insults To Respect From Insults To Respect

Cool Steve’s Puzzled When Blacks Use N-Word

by Jeffrey Rubin, PhD

Welcome to From Insults To Respect. Today, let’s consider a story in which the N-word gets used in a couple of very different ways. A Rough Basketball Game May, 1965. “Wandering around the Coney Island area a few blocks from the amusement parks, 15-year old Steve and his nine-year old brother, Pete, spots some guys about his age playing basketball. As they come closer, they…

Dr. Jeffrey Rubin August 26, 2025 17 min read

How I Met Cool Steve

Regular readers of this blog know that to illustrate an idea, I usually utilize a comic strip or a brief parable. To fully integrate all of the ideas that appear in the blog, I’ve created a coming of age trilogy of novels that is set in Brooklyn that my students over the years have coined The Cool Steve Stories, because one of the main characters…

Dr. Jeffrey Rubin November 3, 2013 23 min read