A Nigger By Any Other Name

There are two major issues that I feel compelled to address here:
1. The "banning" of words that are no longer culturally acceptable.
2. The use of laws and regulations to attempt to enforce behavioral patterns and morality.

The above-referenced article appeared in the BBC News today, as a result of the New York City Council passing a ban on the use of the word "nigger".

I am not a supporter of using this word, because I don't believe in its meaning. I also do not use the words "kike", "spic", "gook", "wop", "cracker", etc. I choose not to use these words because they don't accurately represent my meaning when I refer to specific racial, cultural or religious groups, my perspective on human value, or my way of interacting with other human beings.

But these words do have meanings, and there were (are) times when they appl(y)ied. Imagine a movie about slavery where the slave master was screaming at all his lazy "African-American" slaves. It just doesn't work. And it doesn't matter that this kind of treatment, this kind of behavior isn't "right", because it's true - it really happened that way.

The historical context is important. The accurate portrayal of our collective failure to recognize the equality of human beings is an important thing to retain in our cultural memory, because it's important that we never go back there. Or, that we at least continue to move away from it, since we haven't really gone that far, anyway.

(If I could dig up all the articles I've seen about racial profiling in all contexts - retail sales, police brutality, TSA searches, etc. - this would be the place to reference them. But you already know what I'm talking about, and you've surely had experiences with this yourself. Even if you're a white male, the current dominator of cultural hierarchy - stop feeling so sorry for yourselves, by the way - you go into the wrong neighborhood and you'll know what it's like to be universally shat on.)

The attempt by the New York City Council to whitewash (pun intended) our linguistic history by outlawing the use of a word in a new interpretation, with its own implied meaning, its own life, is an utter failure to understand both the purpose of government, and the purpose of language.

Language, whether we like it or not, reflects an amalgamation of perspective and the desire to communicate thoughts and feelings. I am totally confident that black slave owning whites thought they were truly superior, that these human beings who they enslaved physically - and then moved into enslaving mentally and culturally through disadvantage in education and economy - were, in their minds, a lower life form. They were wrong, but part of why we know that now is because we learned to believe something different, or to preach something different, at least. And the word they used at the time (and in most modern usage) was intended to carry all that meaning. It was a word that served their purpose.

For those that use it today, it carries this and other meanings that we who choose not to use it, do not understand. But that does not give us the right to prevent others from doing so.

Based on what I've seen of modern education, especially urban public schools (which I attended, thank you very much), we are still existing in a plantation mentality, even though the system of enslavement has changed (but that's another topic).

No matter what, government has no business deciding what is morally acceptable for individual behavior. They have no right, but they have taken the leeway given and created a prerogative to tell The People what we should and should not do, should and should not believe.

It is one thing to make laws and pass legislation that provides a structure for society to interact, a set of basic rules that provide guidance to an ever-expanding populace so that we can all live together. But it is quite another to attempt to dictate how we live with one another.

Hatred is a natural human emotion. It grows out of fear, just like almost everything else ("Place an X on the line between Fear and Love...") that destroys us. Should we make it illegal to hate other people? Oh, wait...we did!

This is out of control.

If the government were providing the kinds of services that people require to be integrated into the system, have their views and perspectives represented and appreciated, and provide an outlet for the multitude of undiscovered and undeveloped talent that exists in everyone, maybe we could spend less time banning words because no one would feel the need to discriminate - on the basis of something so utterly meaningless and arbitrary as race, anyway.

Here's hoping that the New York City Council spends its time on more productive matters.