I Think They Need To Understand The Power Behind Those Words

In my article, This Is the Way the N-Word Dies, I wrote about the time some guy called me a ni**er in Macedonia.

I didn’t do anything to provoke him or even notice he was there, but, for some reason, he really wanted me to know he didn’t like black people.

Unfortunately for him, I genuinely didn’t care. Not about his opinion, and not about the words he used to express it. This meant two things:

a) I wasn’t upset.

b) He learned that words can only be weaponised if their target believes they can.

Julia agreed with the premise in theory. But thought the words might be too powerful in practice.

---

Julia:

This certainly makes sense, but I am not sure I see the practical way forward. The injustice of the group who is harmed by a word having to be the ones to dismantle its power by working through all the trauma and adjusting their reaction to it is not lost on me. I think of the c word in my case, and if I am called it, I just can’t stay cool internally. Perhaps I can perform being cool, but it is going to bring me to my knees inside. I have anxiety and a lot of trauma related to my gender. So I think that while theoretically what you say is so very true, that stripping the word of its power to harm by not being harmed by it would remove the power, in life it is messy.

How do we account for trauma responses? And who is responsible for stripping the word of its power? It has to be a mutual effort. Also, what if the Macedonian kid had been instead a mob of strong threatening men? Armed men? Police? What if you had felt in real danger in the moment?

---

Steve QJ:

“The injustice of the group who is harmed by a word having to be the ones to dismantle its power by working through all the trauma and adjusting their reaction to it is not lost on me.”

I understand the injustice of this of course, but there's simply no other way forward. The only other option is to convince people whose sole purpose is to hurt you to stop trying to hurt you. Obviously this is a losing strategy.

Words have exactly as much power as we give them. That's the point I want to drive home here. Of course if somebody says something clearly designed to offend me I might be irritated by it, but we should seriously consider why we care about the opinion of somebody who sets out to offend us in the first place, right?

If they’d been a group of strong threatening men then I’d have responded to the physical threat in the same way I’d respond regardless of what they called me. That might have been fighting back or running or whatever seemed best in the circumstances. The issue still wouldn't be the word, it would be the physical danger.

---

Julia:

I definitely agree that it is helpful to strip such words from having the power to hurt oneself. Personally I have not yet figured out how to do that for myself, and being white this particular word doesn’t harm me, but other words do. Do you have any suggestions as to how people can gain this kind of skill (I see this as a skill in emotional regulation)? I also think such an important part is educating the group that is likely to want to harm another group, preferably from childhood, about the humanity of the group they may be inclined to oppress. Part of that is understanding the power of certain words. But I imagine you agree there.

---

---

Steve QJ:

“Part of that is understanding the power of certain words. But I imagine you agree there.”

Haha, not quite to be honest. Maybe I'm just being pedantic, but I'd say we should understand the intent behind certain words. We should know their history. We should know how they were used.

But I think we should also be doing everything we can to teach people, especially young people, that words by themselves DON'T have power. Again, words only have as much power as we give them. And they can only hurt us if we believe they should.

---

Julia:

“that words by themselves DON'T have power.”

I don’t disagree. Words are collections of phonemes—there is no intrinsic power. And yet, Hitler’s speeches solidified his power. Trump’s rhetoric made white supremacy more in the open, which incidentally led to policy that impacted my life as a now ex-American immigrant (the Muslim ban). So while words shouldn’t have power, in the end they do.

Now, I understand that to this point we are talking about more interpersonal level interactions and not political campaigns or speeches, but in terms of victims of trauma and abuse, I think that while words still shouldn’t hold that kind of power, in practice they often do. I think what you are suggesting—driving home the point that we shouldn’t let word have power over us is good, but it isn’t enough. We have to acknowledge cycles of trauma and abuse, and how those create power dynamics where words do hurt (even if they shouldn’t) and then help people get out of those cycles.

---

Steve QJ:

“Hitler’s speeches solidified his power. Trump’s rhetoric made white supremacy more in the open”

Ah, this is something different.. or actually, maybe not in the end...

This is a demostration of the power of ideas. And most importantly, that power is derived from the fact that the ideas are shared by other people. As you said, white supremacy became more "in the open". It wasn't created by Trump, it was just given permission to show itself. So is the problem really Trump? Or the hatred that was lurking just below the suface?

This is really my point, we don't defeat hatred by hiding certain words. We defeat it by coming face to face with each other and talking. Sometimes those conversations will go horribly of course, but as I said originallly, they're the only way forward. And the only way we (on the non hateful side) can have those conversations is if we disempower those hateful words, no?

As you said, it's unjust. We're being asked to take on a bulk of work that we shouldn't have to. But what's the alternative? Not just for progress, but for our own wellbeing?

---

Julia:

“This is really my point, we don't defeat hatred by hiding certain words.”

I agree. I guess I am also kind of approaching this as a mother, or thinking that way. So I do teach my kids it is wrong to use emotionally charged words against people. That it is wrong to weaponize words to harm people. I guess for me, as a member of the group not personally harmed by the N-word, I see my job as being not weaponizing the word to harm others (because of the idea behind it) and teaching my children the same. Some people reach for any way to harm another when angry. I hope to teach my kids not to try to harm others at all when angry and certainly not to use racism or sexism to do so. For that reason I think they need to understand the power behind those ideas/words. As for its use in a purely academic way, I don’t personally understand the issue there, but then why would I?

---

“It doesn’t feel like my place to criticize how people feel about that, because I don’t like being criticized around my traumas.”

I spend a lot of time thinking about why “social justice” has gone so far off the rails. And one of my theories is that there’s a kind of emotional quid pro quo at play. It might even be subconscious.

“You pretend you don’t see how ridiculous it is when I treat words, regardless of context, as “literal violence™”, and I’ll pretend I don't see how dishonest it is when you use 'trauma' as an excuse for your lack of emotional maturity.” 

That kind of thing.

There’s strength in numbers. And while you’d struggle to legitimise any of the weird beliefs of modern “wokeness” in isolation, if you find enough people who’ll pretend to agree, you can form a coalition of terrible ideas. 

We see the same principle at work with the QAnon/flat-Earth/“Trump won” crowd. 

---

Steve QJ:

“but then why would I?”

This is the trap. You'd understand because you're a human being and possess empathy. I don't need to be a woman to understand how a word like the c-word could be hurtful and why you'd prefer people didn't use it to attack you. But I also know that if you start shrieking and crying because you see the letter "c" written down, you're being unreasonable [editor’s note: for context, one of the examples in my article was a law student who claimed she suffered heart palpitations because an exam question featured the n-word redacted like this: “n____” ].

I have enough respect for you to expect a certain minimum standard of adult behaviour from you. If you fall below that I might well accomodate it, but I'm not going to pretend that it's a reasonable reaction for a woman to have. I'd see that as disrespectful to the emotional intelligence of women in general.

---

Julia:

I don’t have this reaction, but the few times that word has been used against me, I have felt pretty bad. I internalize emotions though and am not one for public displays if I can help it. When I hear it used against other women, I feel angry.

To be fair I have never seen anyone react like that to the N-word either, but I actually cannot specifically recall a time I heard someone called it in hate (not the version ending with an A among friends) though I have a vague recollection that I have. My memory is a sieve these days. You are right in that I have empathy and can imagine that it sucks really bad. I guess that is part of the reason I am so inclined to believe those that say it really is that bad for them.

I know I have trauma triggers from some pretty horrific events in my life, and unfortunately despite my best efforts, simple things (like a couple words) can increase my fight or flight response for days. PTSD sucks. Anyways, I think that I don’t disagree with you in the sense that I think that gaining resilience towards words like the N-word or just against anything racist or misogynistic jerks do or say is a really good idea. I just think it is really hard when PTSD is present.

Like in theory, I know that a single word from a person who lost all my respect the moment they uttered it shouldn’t ruin my week by increasing my anxiety, flashbacks and insomnia for days, and yet somehow that happens. For me some of my triggers are benign things too—things that are not meant in harm but carry weight for me. So the way I see it, I don’t want to have anything to do with triggering people’s PTSD because I know what that feels like, even if I don’t know exactly what the original trauma felt like (as in what it feels like to have racism directed at me).

All that being said, in the case of my trauma, context matters a lot. It isn’t the words themselves but the intent behind them or how they are used (usually in my case when used in a dismissive way).

Maybe for me, it is just messy because of my PTSD. Maybe I am too aware of how PTSD can mess with people. It is just frustrating, because I know that help for trauma is often pretty ineffectual and for many totally inaccessible (because of stigma and because of cost and availability).

So basically I think what you are saying is right, but it also feels impossibly unattainable for those with PTSD. I do hear what you are saying. I just think we as a society need better tools available to help people work through trauma and gain resiliency to triggers and that we should all be trauma-informed and use our words kindly with the knowledge that there are a whole lot of hurting people out there. I am not sure that is divergent from what you are saying—maybe moreso additive.

I do agree that an overblown response that expects that for example an academic to be fired for teaching for example the history of the word is bizzare and hard to understand. That’s just not triggering to me, but I try to be empathetic to the fact it seems to be triggering to someone. The answer should not be firing that academic though, unless they actually were weaponizing the word to harm a student.

I haven’t witnessed this myself and have only heard of such things through social media. It’s been a while but I have a literature degree (though not from an American university) and there were lots of slurs in the historical fiction we studied, and this was never an issue. My professors contextualized them and used the text as an avenue for discussing racism, colonialism, hegemony etc. But there is a new generation in university now, so things might look different, or maybe different on American campuses. I do have degrees from an American university too, but they were not literature degrees and were slur free, so hard to compare.

All this to say, that I agree with your main premise. I just need a practical way forward for those with PTSD or undiagnosed trauma. I don’t expect that you have to have all the answers for that either—maybe more something for me to think about. In fact this whole discussion has made me realize further how important it is to prioritize mental healthcare.

---

Steve QJ:

“In fact this whole discussion has made me realize further how important it is to prioritize mental healthcare.”

Yep, I couldn't agree more with this.

---

Julia:

Thanks for this excellent discussion. It was very thought provokingto hash this out with you and it is much appreciated. Have a good night!

---

Steve QJ:

My pleasure. You too!

---

According to the orthodoxy, racism is prejudice plus power. And according to that same orthodoxy, people of colour are powerless.

My Macedonian friend certainly believed that. 

He believed that if he called me names, I'd helplessly fly into a rage or maybe burst into tears. It didn’t even occur to him that his opinion simply wouldn’t matter to me. 

But the truth is, people of colour are, by definition, more powerful than racists. Women are, by definition, more powerful than misogynists. Men are more powerful than misandrists. Gay people are more powerful than homophobes. On and on. We're always more powerful than those who feel insecure enough to attack us without even knowing us.

That's why they want to attack us. 

Sure, we can still be hurt, both physically and emotionally. Everybody can be hurt physically and emotionally. But we decide how seriously to take the words our attackers use. We decide whether to buy into their beliefs about us. We decide how much power to give them. 

I suggest we give them none.