I think it's terrible, but it's hard to argue with success

This is not needed to get get someone to read an article, not if you can actually write.
Just, ugh - don't.

Takes out the ugly sting of seeing the actual word, and yet conveys the sense of quotation of what the President's most racist critics would want to scream to his face.

(Author's note: While I do not use the unaltered form of "n*gg*r" in this post because I doubt its necessity in this post, I do find its use in the headline to have been necessary for its confrontational effect to readers.)

I think the headline is brilliant and on-point. If it pisses you off, it's supposed to. It's in your face because it's time we stopped pussyfooting (To be clear, an analogy to how cats walk rather than female genitalia) around this, trying to remain high-minded and better than a certain flavor of conservative for whom the only thing that matters is that there is a black man in the White House...I realize that a lot of your may never have dealt with this, but it's always been there. I was 8 or 9 (Around the time Jesse Jackson was running for President) the first time I heard the following "joke": "Why's it called the White House?" (No N*gg*rs allowed!) The punchline is obvious to anybody capable of comprehending the warped worldview of the racist fucks we confront or fail to confront by misdirecting the outrage at this headline.

Don't be pissed off at Collier for writing it or WestView News for printing it or the editor for letting it pass his desk...be pissed at the large number of your fellow Americans for whom the only thing that matters is that there is a black President in the White House and that nothing is ever going to be right again to them. That is all they see or are ever going to see...a black face in a monolithic gallery of white men. Their own political demise encapsulated within that face, if we will it.

Such a headline is crass because the reality is crass and serves as a call to action. It's no longer enough to know they are bad people who hate the President for the color of his skin, it's time to confront them. Actively, aggressively, completely. It's time to take the fight to the racists...it's not enough to acknowledge they exist. It's beyond time. No more time to politely countenance that they're a minority and that they do not speak for a majority of anybody. Acknowledging their racism shines a light on their racism and labels it for what it is: Offensive. Not archaic because it was never appropriate at any era of American history. Something to be opposed with the entirety of our will and given no quarter. Un-American.

There's a black man in the White House and we worked our asses off to put him there. Because he was the best candidate for the job, because it was time, because I live in an America where any child can someday grow-up to be President...no matter how much that truth pisses some people off. The headline may be crass...but it speaks volumes. It says "We know this is what you think--of him, of us for putting him into office; we see you for what you are--we're coming to end your worldview." Embrace the headline for what it is...the fulfillment of a dream, not yet that of Dr. King, but that a generation earlier of Langston Hughes as reflected in his poems I, too and Let America be America Again. Not a dream of the destination, but a dream of the turning point of the struggle. The point where we acknowledge the racism of the enemy and begin to confront it everywhere including on their own turf. That headline reflects better than Hughes could ever hope to see in his own lifetime and could only hope to see in that of his children: A black person, by any name or epithet, in the most-powerful office in America.

A victory. A small victory, one that reveals that the fight has begun not ended, but a victory nonetheless.