We learned an important lesson in the past few weeks in regards to the cover of our March issue.

As those of you who are old enough to remember, in 1972 George Carlin did a monologue on the “seven words you can never say on television.” Those were shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits. He updated that list in a performance at Carnegie Hall performance that appeared on HBO in their 1982-83 season and the list grew substantially.

But those words were way, way before cable television came along and brought those “filthy” words not only on to TV, but onto radio (listen to the radio lately?) and into the common vernacular.

We caught some severe flack—and rightfully so—for the usage of the words “Strange Fruit” on our March cover, that depicted the band MyNameIsJohnMichael hanging from a playground monkeybars. The idea was conceived innocently as a young band hanging like fruit from a tree, waiting to be picked by a record label.

Well, the photo in conjunction with the headline “Strange Fruit” hit lots of raw nerves. It recalled Billie Holiday’s song that described the bodies of black men’s hanging from trees who had been lynched by Southern racists—a really awful connection and mental reference.

We removed the photo and cover from our website, apologized publicly as well as to the band. We’ve reprinted covers for the magazines we’re sending to SXSW in Austin. We made a dumb mistake, really dumb and insensitive.

But thinking about all this retrospect, it struck me that many people caught the reference, but weren’t offended. And many didn’t catch the reference at all. Strangely enough, there was a lot more outrage from the white community. I was incredibly freaked out and upset when the blogosphere exploded in a mushroom cloud of ranting and screaming about OffBeat and how racist the cover was. God, if anything, OffBeat certainly can’t be considered racist. Insensitive, for sure.

So I started thinking about when, why and how words that have had very negative meanings have either ended up in common speech or have been rendered innocuous over time, and how that happens. How long does it take before we get over horrible incidents—tied to a few words—and shrug and move on (like Carlin’s filthy words). Do those offensive words ever become acceptable to use?

Over a decade ago, Bunny Matthews, who was then our editor and the OffBeat cartoonist, did a cartoon for our Jazz Fest issue that compared the Jazz Fest security folk to a bunch of Nazis because of the way people are herded in and out of the Fairgrounds. Some security people aren’t exactly pleasant about it, either (IMHO, they’ve improved a whole lot since we ran that cartoon). But at the time, it was a joke. Unfortunately, the Jazz Fest sure wasn’t laughing, neither was the Jewish Anti-Defamation League. All we could think about at the time was that even television shows like “Seinfeld”–which truly exposed Jewish culture to a mainstream audience–used the word “Nazi” to describe a very disagreeable person during their show (everyone surely remembers the “Soup Nazi”).

My question is, do our sensitivities run so deep that certain words can never be used in politically correct American society? Can no one use the word “Nazi” without a mental reference to the Holocaust coming to mind? Is any reference to the South’s nasty Jim Crow racial history—as egregious as it may be—off-limits as a literary or a visual reference? Can African-Americans use the “n-word” to each other, yet if it’s used by a non-African American—even if it’s used in a playful way—should it necessarily be construed  as unacceptable and loathsome? Are we still that divided by race? Are white and black people still that far apart?

Again—we didn’t mean to offend anyone. The people at OffBeat have a unique perspective when it comes to skin color: we really don’t care. Music is color blind. Our eyes and ears are color blind.

Surprisingly, many young people we talked to about the cover didn’t even know about the Billie Holiday song connection. How long does it take before people begin to forget how horrible racism is? Should we ever forget, even in times where interracial dating and marriage is acceptable?

But the wounds are still fresh, and we are truly sorry. We just didn’t think it through. We have to comfort ourselves with the fact that OffBeat’s body of work, which if investigated, would certainly have revealed to anyone who deemed the cover “racist,” that they were reading into our cover a sentiment that wasn’t there to begin with.

The questions remains: Do we continue to refer to our negative past, and by doing that perpetuate racial, religious, ethnic, anti-gay and other inflammatory connections? Or do we try to get to a space where we can move beyond the hatred and distrust that some humans seem to thrive upon? Hatred and distrust that stems from something that happened a long time ago? How long does it take before subsequent generations are themselves color blind?

I wonder: Will it ever be possible for us to love each other regardless of our skin color, our sexual orientation, our ethnicity? Can it ever really change?