It's Obvious Who They Should Have Sympathy For

I’ve always loved New Year’s.

Yes, it’s arbitrary. Yes, there’s no particular reason to set resolutions and plan new starts on the 1st of January. But it’s a nice reminder to take stock of where you are. To look back over what you’ve learned. To re-examine ways of thinking you’ve come to take for granted.

In my article, What Does Ni**er Mean?, I asked why the n-word is so taboo. What does it make certain black people feel? What does it say about the person using it? What does it mean?

Dale had some wonderful thoughts on this. So even though this only just meets the criteria for a conversation, I thought it was worth sharing.

He begins with a quote from the article.

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Dale:

“A curse, it turns out, only has power if both parties believe in it.”

For most of my life I was triggered by being called nigger and hearing Whites use it in my presence as though I wasn't there.

I had to have learned to be triggered from somewhere, although I can't quite pinpoint from where.

When I worked on Wall Street throughout the 90's, I was called nigger on average about 5x per month.

Then, when I turned 40, after learning about the history of my slave name, hearing stories of my mother growing up on a sharecroppers farm, and discovering the Blacks built the roads of the Wall St. that I was now thriving on, the word had no impact on me.

In fact, I began to challenge other Black men to try on my point of view for size.

I would tell them when a White person calls me nigger, this is what goes through my mind:

Whites kidnapped my people from Africa, brought us to a land they stole, a land created by slaveowners with rules made for Whites only, got 400 years of free labor and wealth, put us through reconstruction, Black Codes, Jim Crow, etc. ...

For my mother, a high school drop out, who picked cotton, that never made more than $30k, who put me through school, where I then got a Masters in Finance, and was better and smarter that my Wall St. cohorts ...

Im standing in front of that White person, smarter than him, with more money than him, at peace with myself, with the best woman alive that I married .. that White person can't say ANYTHING to move me, so the best thing he has is to call me nigger!

Which means he blew his 400 year head start and is now throwing a hail mary and hoping for the best.

So when I hear nigger, I give them a smirk that summarizes everything that I have said above. No need for me to punch down. It's obvious to anyone in earshot who they should have sympathy for.

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Steve QJ:

“So when I hear nigger, I give them a smirk that summarizes everything that I have said above. No need for me to punch down. It's obvious to anyone in earshot who they should have sympathy for.”

My only regret is that I have only 50 claps to give.

As I’ve said more than once, no person who is happy within themselves has ever used the n-word, or any slur, to attack another person.

Thank you for this. I might well quote you at some point. I truly hope that one day all black people feel this way.

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It’s fair to say we’re way past the “sticks and stones” era.

Words are violence, disagreement is hatred, imperfectly phrased sentences cause “harm,” to hear a growing portion of the internet tell it, a dictionary is a lethal weapon.

But what that portion of the internet seems to miss, is the insults only work if you believe them.

It’s impossible to insult somebody with a characteristic they’re proud of. Try reducing an intelligent person to tears by telling them how smart they are, or a beautiful person by telling them how lustrous their hair is.

It’s impossible to insult somebody with a characteristic they’re indifferent to. Try hurting somebody’s feelings by drawing attention to the pattern of lines on their palm or the shape of their molars.

It’s only possible to insult somebody with a characteristic they’re already insecure about. And yes, still today, especially if they live in a white-majority country, it’s understandable that some black people have a degree of insecurity about being black.

Achieving racial equality depends on lots of things. But one that we don’t talk about nearly enough, is a shift in the way black people see themselves. A rejection of the belief that any reference to the colour of their skin could be innately hurtful.

We can’t control how others see or speak to us. But we can control how we see ourselves. As I said to Dale, it’s a lesson I wish more black people would learn.