Here I was minding my own business like shop keepers often do. Then I decided to leave that store and switched to Netflix instead. My reasoning of course was not prompted by the search for something meaningful, but as you may know or maybe you don’t, meaning comes up and bites you on the part of your body you use to do your thinking with.
So, anyway, [deep sigh] I watched an episode of Chelsea. She is wonderfully funny [at times] and irritating [at times] and interesting [always]. That’s what a chat show* host is supposed to be, methinks. If they weren’t, then you would not watch them.
[These asterisks will appear throughout this musing so that you will think that this is profound.]
Chelsea interviewed Selma Hayek, [delightful intelligent person as ever] then riffed through some anti Trump, anti Republican stuff as is her wont [ three cheers for that] and then talked about, and with, refugees in Britain. * [Lachrymal conversations and what’s the other word for making one really angry at powers that be?] And then she talked with Jerrod Carmichael [ thirty-not- something-but-just thirty actor/comedian/script writer] who blew me away with his cyclonic mind and at the same time his zephyr like sensitivity. JC [as nobody but me likes to call him*] talked about the word ‘nigger’ and the power it has over people. And why it needed to be discussed.
So it got me thinking.
Language is why and how we evolved. It wasn’t tools. Apes use them. So do otters. And even birds. It wasn’t bipedalism. I think that was partly something about standing up to see farther like sifakas and meerkats do, and maybe it was just an effect rather than a cause of developing brain size. * Language differentiates us from every other species on the planet. Sure they say that dolphins and whales and birds and chimps all communicate. But they don’t label stuff and they do not articulate that label. We are the only species that seems to have developed ‘otherness’. Because we differentiate I from you, we from they and us from them.
Language begins with the idea of self. Self awareness* allows us to see what else is out there apart from us. That leads to needing a word/label for ‘that’ and then for us to all to agree that that was what we have now called ‘it’.
In ancient Indian Upanishad philosophy, it was posited that it was the arrival of ‘Vak’ or voice/speech that caused man to forget his or her divinity.* The wonderful sage, Ramana Maharishi (c 1900’s) said that there was no thought before the thought ‘I’. Go behind that thought, he suggested, and there you would find God.
Words obviously have power. Labels as different from words have even more. A Word with its own unique context becomes a label. Context has history, culture and personal memory attached to it. Most importantly, as JC hinted, it has intent affixed or prefixed.
So the word ‘caste’ even though it is Portuguese in origin has come to denote a particular social status in India. Its intent however is not so much as to uplift oneself as it is to demean someone else.
In India we have given power to this by defining whole groups of people as Scheduled Caste people. Oddly this was so as to provide affirmative action to them in jobs, government schemes and education. However, in defining them such, we not only perpetuate their difference but paint a sort of target on them. People will say that this SC definition is good because it recognizes that they are disadvantaged and need support. And should society help poorer people? It should. So the definition could well have been about their economic status rather than a definition of their birth.
Or for that matter the color of their skin.
In The US this has become a huge fault line. The African American plate colliding with the Caucasian American plate. Deep fissures are emergent. And everyone waits for the big earthquake!
But when we examine these labels we see that the labels have been created by one segment and then accepted almost with gratitude by the other. There is no classification for white Americans. You have Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans*, Indian Americans and native Americans. So as Trevor Noah asks in his hilarious stand up show*, how come Native Americans have a label though they were the first Americans and the white invaders don’t have any prefix? It’s as if the ‘rich’ have labelled the others. *
And this is true of immigrants also. No one questions at least in the US a European Caucasian immigrant’s experience. The subject of integration, assimilation, acceptance or rejection is addressed largely to people of color, or non white people. It would be of lesser consequence that the recant white immigrant say for Russia or an eastern European country was less educated both in English and in general than a doctor from Somalia.
The power of labels transcends color. We use labels to insinuate and contort meaning.
Take Obamacare. There is no such act in the US Congress. There is the Affordable Care Act which sounds benign, full of tender mercy for the needy etc. Politicians with intent have called it Obamacare, making it the private preserve of a president they have demonized for some. *
The same is true for Climate Change. In the wonderful book Unspeak* by Steven Poole, he talks of how we have used words to mitigate meaning for political intent. Climate crisis became Global warming became Climate change. You can see the slowly decreasing danger; “Gentlemen, we can now say that the threat level has been reduced to pale yellow!”
In the same book Mr. Poole talks of how the word community has been misused. The label is affixed to other communities: The African American Community, the Asian community etc. No one questions that community implies shared values and concerns. A well educated African American living on the upper west ide of New York may not have the same concerns as his ‘brother’ who lives in Harlem. They are however equated by the label.
Which brings us back to the N word. The person who was labelled as such was a slave; abused and exploited. The pejorative has come to mean for people of color a symbol of shared history and fellowship, not be used by anyone outside of the circle, much like a Masonic handshake bans outsiders. It is a “ghetto-ising” word.
Sadly, it allows the word to live on; it gives it power. It makes you sit with your face to the past and asks you to portend the future. *
Use it and such labels such as “Dalit’s’ for the 200 million untouchables of India as an affirmation of your humanity, not as a distinction to separate yourself form it.
Do not create otherness.
Notes
*chat show: hmm odd word; chat as in friendly banter or as the Bard may have hinted, sound and fury signifying nothing?
*Britain: Notice how I have avoided the prefix, Great? A subtle dig at what the Right leaning, immigrant fearing politicos are doing to once the Great Britain
*JC: it didn’t escape me that I have may made him somewhat messianic. Just as it doesn’t escape me that phonetically JayZ may have attempted similar affinity.
*Brain Size: if only that had defined dominance, Earth would be elephantine or cetacean!
*Self Awareness: Apparently a test for this the mirror test: Elephants and Parrots apparently recognize that isn’t another elephant or parrot in the mirror. I would distinguish between self recognition and self awareness.
*Divinity: In a sense this is akin to the forbidden fruit in the garden of Eden: till then Adam and Eve and all the other creatures saw no distinction between themselves. And after eating of the fruit, Adam and Eve saw their nakedness and most importantly their differences, obvious of course to all of us today who have seen naked people.
* { —} Americans: the truth is White Americans have usurped the title of Americans. So when Donald Trump says Make America Great Again, the allusion is clear: Make America White Again
* Obamacare: Why is Obama referred to as the first Black President? His mother was white. Why is patrimony more important? And why did he not define himself as just an American president and a damn good one at that?
*Please visit unpeak.submarinechannel.com which is ‘an interactive documentary investigating the manipulative power of language.’ It’s fun and educational and somewhat chilling too!!
* Sitting with your face to the past etc.: A professor from Dublin University moonlighting as a guide to the wonderful Neolithic tombs outside Dublin, suddenly segued to the topic of Northern Ireland and the tenuous peace (at that time); She said, “How can you solve a problem by constantly turning your face to the past while trying to discuss the future?” Wise words, I think.
So It Got Me Thinking 