Hi there.
I’ve been tooling around Medium.com these days, and also my Instagram feeds and Twitter, looking for things that really stand out to me, people who have inventive ideas that are going to take us to the next level in these troubling times.
I don’t know about you, but this time in our world feels apocalyptic to me. I wouldn’t be surprised if angels started falling out of the sky one day. Seriously, I’d love to see that. We really need some hope.
One thing that stood out to me was from this woman who doesn’t have much of a following, but her ideas are pretty radical. And the more I sat with her ideas and thought about them, the more I realized, “Hey, that might actually kinda work.”
Her thought is that we can use language, particularly loaded language, as a form of nonviolent protest, as a weapon, to redirect the negative energy being sent to the poor and marginalized in our society, and direct that negativity instead toward the corrupt authority figures in a unique kind of way.
She says, for instance, that instead of making the “N-word” a forbidden word, we start taking that word and directing it at the people holding racist ideologies, such as Donald Trump, and maybe even others.
When I first heard this, I thought she was crazy, and I was wildly unsettled. I talked to friends about it, who all thought it was a bad idea, that it would unleash the usage of a word that should never be used. As a white man, I have learned that the N-word is off-limits, because it was used for so long to harass slaves and black people and enforce white oppression.
But when you unpack this a bit, you see the layers of how using it in a new way coheres to a form of nonviolent protest, a way of using language to get at something in the poisonous roots of our system, and perhaps overturn it, if we’re brave enough.
This is exactly what Martin Luther King, Jr. did. He was aware of the racism inherent in people’s hearts, and his organized marches of unity, of whites and blacks sitting at the lunch counters and enduring violence for the sake of integration, showed what already existed and had been carefully hidden in the bowels of our culture.
Using the N-word in a new way would reveal the poison at our well, and perhaps help us get over the hump of our still-segregated society.
Let me give you two examples:
1) The word “Queer.”
For a long time, the word “queer” was used to bash people who were gay, lesbian, or transgender. Over time, however, those people started sticking up for themselves, and adopted the term “queer” with pride. People who are gay now, for instance, use the term, “gay pride,” all the time. There is even an entire academic system devoted to “Queer Theory” and “Queery Studies.”
This shows how we can take a word used as an oppressive force, and turn it around to create new meaning.
2) Traditional Quaker “plain speech,” from the 17th Century.
When Quakers, or the Religious Society of Friends, began congregating and exploring a new way of practicing faith in 17th century England, they adopted something called “plain speech,” whereby they refused to treat the “elite” members of society any differently than those considered to be of a lower caste. Instead of addressing the king as “your majesty,” or using the formal “you,” they adopted terms like “thee, and thou,” and later just “thee,” toward authority figures, to signify that all people are equal. They also did not drop their hats to those in positions of power. This was a rebellious and radical act at the time, but we don’t necessarily see its parallel in our time now, since language has changed so much, and using “thee” these days would just make you pretentious. (That formality in usage today would be tone-deaf.)
This is why I think that taking the root of America’s corruption and oppression, which is acquiring wealth, power, and dominion in the world based on slavery and oppression of women and minorities (including the genocide of indigenous peoples), and reversing it through language can be a dynamic way to begin overturning the system.
The word “nigger” is a term used to enforce oppression of black people in the United States. It has been used for centuries now, not only to treat blacks as secondary citizens, but also to lynch and segregate black people from white people, or even other races, who seem to adopt the majority’s prejudices when they immigrate to this country. If we, then, reverse this word, which originally meant “ignorant person,” and direct it at the people in positions of authority who are destroying the earth, subsisting on lies, corruption, and an obsession with money rather than any sort of moral integrity, we can create a nonviolent way of reforming and reframing the system.
Now, the word “nigger” refers to the white misogynist male who lies, deceives, and oppresses those on the margins. He is the 1% who refuses to contribute to bettering society, and benefits on the backs of the poor.
We know that many black people have adopted the term “nigga” for friends and acquaintances, as a sign of affection in hip hop music and beyond. The next step may be to change, or appropriate, the word “nigger” for a different, or wider, cohort.
And not only that, using the word “nigga” widely, for people of all races and colors, as someone who “just doesn’t get it,” but is also a “neighbor,” could potentially adhere to Jesus’s original teachings of loving your neighbor as yourself.
Instead of the word “nigga” being a word only used in the black community, we can perhaps see it as a word of unity, where white people are “niggas,” too.
And the word “nigger,” the more violent term, is reserved for those who are ignorantly, blindly, creating a world unfit for our children, those who spread lies and corruption on a daily basis, and are destroying nature as well as the human mind. Donald Trump would be #1 in this category.
I could go on, but I think you get the gist. I’d love to know what you think!
Here is a video that expresses some of these ideas through visual and auditory expression, since some people learn better that way.
Thanks for reading! I’d love to know your thoughts in the comments!