I spend a lot of time thinking about how we people relate to one another. Over eons, human beings have developed a few tools and perhaps the most important tool we use everyday is language.
I have also found, after a tad of reflection, that language tends to be an inadequate way to convey information and articulate all the circumstances that we as human beings encounter in our lives.
Oh the confusion of language.
Let's look at how the way we use the word "love". I love to golf. I love my children. I love my parents. I love to cook. I love to have sex, ad infinitum. We all have this extremely expressive word, love, fall from our lips constantly and yet the meaning of the word changes with the activity that we use to describe our "love".
Other words convey other expressions of our humanity. Let's take the current hot-button word, racism. The word is bandied about by politicians, minority groups, people of color, white people who feel disenfranchised, and yet the precise usage and meaning of the word does not generally convey how different individuals/groups employ it.
When a white person calls me a "nigger", I can pretty much assume that the individual has racist feelings. But what about black folks, people in my own race who harbor and hurl truly toxic sentiments vocally about who I married, my bi-racial children, the color of my/their skin, whether I perm, press, or color my hair, or the real divider "You ain't black enough sistah. You a sell out"?
Is it fair to call individuals within one's own race racist? The use of the words, including "nigger", in such contexts are typically rejected as racists and/or simply ignored. But the emotion and feelings expressed would clearly be racist if those same words were spoken to me or any other black person by a white person.
Some would posit such usage as "self-hating" and yet that empty approximation does not explain the context of defining individuals that criticize others within their clan? Racial differences and the eternal reliance on describing toxic human emotions and behavior as racist, sexist, et al, is just an exercise in futility.
Words, that is, language has greatly undermined our ability to accurately communicate with one another. Language is supposed to be a powerful tool that raises us above the lesser animals and yet we are interminably trapped by its rigid and inaccurate confines.
Language often acts as a barrier, a tool used to control or coerce, instead of creating open lines of communication. Much of the dialogue that occurs today is divisive. Talented and goal directed women are coined as aggressive or feminists and these tags are never meant as a compliment but rather a code to either control or demean. The media is rife with descriptive invectives to demean and impugn an individual killed by the police, such as thug (code for young black male), gang member, " a long criminal history", whether any of these polarizing words about someone's character are accurate. Isn't it interesting that the media never describes a young, white male criminal as a "thug"?
So, I question the value of our ever-changing use of so-called politically correct language to define an individual's assumed character, race, gender, or sexual identity. If only such words like whore, slut, junkie, queer, thug, liberal, neo-con, and even anti-Semitic, to name just a few of those words that fall from the lips and the pen as if they were delicious fruit, were to simply disappear from the landscape of humanity, then perhaps our world might become just a tad more person friendly.