A simple perusal of a white country singer’s bio (not that I am interested in country music or in secular music, in general) led me to some issue this country singer had. He used a word, some unknown word, wrongly. Whatever the word, he used it wrongly because it was not his to use. No humans own any word, by the way. Probably Noah Webster forgot to include that word in his dictionary.
Now, I am no fan of using derogatory words or curse words. They just tick me off, badly. Use a curse word to me, and I am infuriated. They bring back the trauma of childhood ears bathed in sailor-type adjectives of a frustrated, yet loving, grandmother whom we affectionately monikered “Mama”. She largely replaced my mother who died way before her time at age twenty-nine. So, I have a reason to hate profanity. Profanity for me is something that is laced with death, and suffering. And I have not even discussed my Christian beliefs–a true basis of my verbal astuteness.
Fast forward to the 1990’s, over eleven years after my mother’s death. I am a newly-minted New Yorker, transfixed in a newfound identity: I am no longer just a Jamaican, I am now an oppressed Black man (I prefer “brown”, though) in an oppressor’s world. Everything is suspect. Don’t mind the killing in Brownsville, or East New York. Don’t mind me being held up at gunpoint, by a fellow-black man, while trying to earn a minimum wage living in these tumultuous 90’s. A UPS fellow-worker loses his life while traveling to work on a train I normally take. We work the graveyard shift. Don’t mind that the violence in the inner-city are executed and promulgated by my misguided and desperate, mentally unstable and distressed, even hurting, and yes, oppressed fellow-black men. Yet, only two of the adjectives, “black” and “oppressed”, make the conversation in which I am frequently embroiled in my afflicted, often racially-misguided soul (I no longer subscribe to the social ideology of race). This is the 1990’s and many years beyond.
And yet the story is even more complex that this. More complex than I have time to discuss here.
Fast forward twenty-five years. I have suffered a lot from my willing brainwashing of my views on the American people–a people whoever imperfect, among whom I live. I am even a US citizen, now. I have been one for almost two decades. Yet, I have seen too much division and negativity in discussions on so-called race. To unsustainable levels. There is a persistent bifurcation. Confusion. Subjection to- and inner turmoil over- the dominant narrative that I’ve allowed to play out in my mind. Persistently kind run-ins with conscientious officers (police or state troopers) have not sat well with me, though these is my usual experience. Still I often I allow myself to be overcome by the dominant narrative, the one that paints all white people as either oppressors or people complicit with a nationwide or worldwide system of oppression. People who cooperate willingly or even unconsciously with an oppressive system. But any rational person can see that human interaction is not that simple. Such a simplistic view is extremely unhelpful and very damaging to the psyche. There are thousands of variables affecting human behavior. And they cannot all be reduced to skin color, social privileges, or even ideologies that rightly admit the reality of oppression, including racism.
To reduce the human daily living reality to a mere concomitance of race and racial interactions is to, in effect, devalue the human being. No one is truly helped. It is the equivalent of seeking to find a “Theory of Everything” to govern social and human interaction. There is none. Humans are too complex for that.
So, let me again underscore make my pitch: liberal America, please stop pimping my color. I do not appreciate it. You are not helping me. Stop building more trauma into words than they should have. It does not help me or my children or my wife. We are also Americans. Americans who happen to be brown, not brown Americans. We are humans who happen to be brown, not brown humans. There is nothing special in our brown-ness that makes us more or less human. Stop it.
So, yes, a curse word is traumatic to me, because it evokes my childhood trauma which includes my mother being murdered, delay murdered. Dying. Leaving six children behind. I was only six. I don’t need to be bathed in the pity evoked by someone seeking to mute everything that reminds me of my childhood. I need skills to cope. I am no longer a child. I need to learn to cope so that I may live in my chronological development period. It is puerile at best, and dismissive and misguided at worst, to always walk ahead of brown people with a banner heralding a command to white people to not speak what they are feeling at the moment or even permanently. Is it bad to use words, in the presence of oppressed people, that evoke traumatic experiences? Yes; but it is not the unforgivable sin. Do we not experience the same thing in our families? Don’t we learn to forgive and have honest discussions, without cordoning off the hurting ones from the instigators of hurt? How else will they family cohere?
Please, stop weaponizing my color. A word is no worse when it’s said that when it is in a person’s mind, affecting their behavior. In fact, it would be better to hear a bad word that offends or even traumatize than to have the same word, unsaid, motivate the actions of those who only pretend to see me as fully human.
Jesus says it best when he refers to the defilement of what is in the heart. We get it wrong. Though hurtful and uncouth words used by some may affect black or brown people traumatically, it affects those who also use these words. Further alienating them and not forgiving them does no good to either the offending person or to the offended.
One final word: empowerment. The empowerment we need as brown people is not the weaponizing of our color against those who stand to cast stones or words at us, or even think evil of us. The latter evil-thinking is hard to identify in the broader society, because of people’s lack of discernment, because of people’s susceptibility to the pretentiousness of the part of people who hold back their true thoughts. Recall the story in John 8, of the Bible. The story of the woman caught in adultery. Jesus could have spent much time calling out the sins of the men who brought her in. But He simply stooped down, wrote (possible the accusers’ sins) on the ground, telling the would be stoners to cast a stone if they had no sin. Incidentally, I say to Liberals who seek to draw the cordon between themselves and their openly erring brothers and sisters, “Cast a stone of criticism, only if you have never sinned in thought or word, in the same respect of disparaging a human who happens to be brown or female or …” And please know that in your casting of stones, you’re leaving the hurt or offended brown person stooping and seeking for help with the same trauma that people with your attitude failed to help them with in the era evoked by the words you now obsess about. Please stop weaponizing our color. Encourage our healing from trauma, which starts with loving those who hated or abused us because of the color of our skin. Underscore the importance of forgiveness by first forgiving those who do what you consider uncouth. We too think these words are uncouth and shameful and hurtful. And, please know that the use of words doesn’t have the same traumatic effect on all brown people. We are all at different stages in the healing of wounds caused by racism. But racism is not the only issue we face. Stop putting us in boxes. Stop tying us to our past traumas; we are seeking to grow away from their grip. Stop encouraging self-pity.
We are human beings who happen to be brown, not brown human beings. Please stop weaponizing our skin color, it is only skin. We are more than our skins. We are more than our trauma. Thank you.
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