This week the NFL competition committee will meet to discuss possible rules changes for the upcoming season. Certainly the biggest and most controversial proposal that will be voted on is a new rule that would allow referees to penalize players for using the N-word.

Beyond the obvious comedy of a slew of whites telling black guys not to use the N-word because of its history, there are several issues at work here.

If the goal here is to legislate out abusive, racial or offensive slurs as part of some anti-bullying campaign, then I’m in. We just had two major blowups during the NFL season involving the N-word and in both instances it was white players saying it in a racially motivated way toward blacks. But everyone knows that primary users of the N-word (the version with an ‘a’ at the end) are primarily black players. So the penalties will be enforced most in instances of a black player saying this to another black player.

The NFL draft is about to feature its first openly gay player, Michael Sam. Other players such as former Vikings punter Chris Kluwe who have been staunch advocates of gay rights have been ostracized by NFL franchises. Last summer a group of players who are gay decided not to come out publicly.

Is no one is talking about penalizing players for using the word “fag” or other gay slurs? No one is crusading for eliminating other racial or sexual epithets. It seems like this is just another form of alienating young black men, who use the word “nigga” rather than going full-steam ahead and eliminating all uses of discriminatory language.

Now, it should be said that this charge is being led by former NFL players John Wooten and Jim Brown, both of whom are black. Wooten and Brown were heavily involved in the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s and have been outspoken advocates of equality ever since. They believe that the incessant use of the N-word in both pop culture and everyday life trivializes the tribulations African-American have been through.

The sentiment Wooten in particular has articulated is that he doesn’t want young kids to grow up in a world where using the N-word is “OK.” Unfortunately, we’re already there. As a black man ,myself, I think there is a huge generational gap between me and the era Wooten and Brown are describing.

Just a couple of weeks ago a young white guy, who is 18, was hanging out with me and we were listening to music. He was singing with the lyrics which included the N-Word. I will admit it was a little odd hearing him say it, and I sort of chastised him at the time (jokingly) but in retrospect I see a disconnect between what we were doing and what my forefathers endured. My friend’s only context for the N-word was music. He hears it in every song he listens to. For him that word conjures up images of Tyler the Creator or Sage the Gemini, not KKK members chasing someone down the street. As someone who was called the real N-word growing up in a small, white town I certainly know the difference in my heart between real rednecks talking crazy and this buddy of mine singing a song with none of that in his heart.

So this is a murky issue in daily life much less on an NFL field. Exactly what will the penalties be for a player uttering the N-word? Will there be audio proof that he said it? How can the officials be sure exactly who in a pile of bodies uttered that one profane word?

NFL games should be decided on the field. The team that plays better is the team that should win. If we start instituting penalties for every single uncouth thing, that is all these games are going to start being.

Without knowing exactly what the proposed penalties would be, it is hard to envision what the actual impact will be in terms of these penalties deciding games. Unsportsmanlike and taunting penalties carry with them 15 yards, and it is safe to assume these penalties would be similar.

But unsportsmanlike penalties are visible to the audience watching the game. We can see a player give a late hit out of bounds or spike the ball down taunting. We can’t hear what the players are saying on the field.

So if we’re at the end of a Super Bowl and our team just got a huge defensive stop on fourth down it would be pretty devastating to have a referee come up and say that someone on our team used bad language, thereby awarding the opposing team 15 yards and a first down. There goes the Super Bowl! And for something nobody even saw or heard. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that result would be fairly unacceptable to most fans!

And there is zero argument that uttering the word is offensive to or hurts the feelings of the players on the other team. Obviously, if we’re at the point of legislating it out of the game it is something that’s being said by players on every team. Additionally, it’s okay to smash into someone so hard they have a concussion and face handicaps later in life as long as we don’t call them a bad word? Nonsense.

In no way do I wish to make light of the efforts men like Wooten and Brown have made. Lord knows I wouldn’t be here able to be a sports columnist if it weren’t for the battles they fought.

But the football field is not the place to start. It is certainly not the place to further the singling out and alienation of young, black men who speak a certain way. Not while it is still OK for a middle-aged white man in Florida to brutally, violently kill a black child for playing their rap music too loud. I could provide example after example of real racism and real trivialization of that kind of language. We should eliminate those things from our society. But those battles need to be fought in our every day lives not out on the football field.