More on #NotYourRedskin

Yesterday's story turned into a day-long discussion among my peeps on Facebook. In at least one case, one of my friends seized the opportunity to push her own Facebook friends to reevaluate their positions, and as she recounted to me the turns their discussion took, it pushed me to expand on my own thinking and help her add some rhetorical weapons to her arsenal.

One thing I need to make clear at the outset, though: For us (for any marginalized population dealing with the fact and fallout of that marginalization), this is not generally something that we need to "clarify" in our minds, to "rethink" or "reevaluate." We don't need to consider the "arguments" that opponents continually insist that we do, as though their arguments are the magic bullet that will logically invalidate everything with think. You know why?

We've heard them all already.

Yes, ALL. I have yet to encounter an argument that opposes my own anti-racism (or anti-[other]ism) positions that I have not already heard many times over, in every conceivable iteration; that I have not already considered many times over, at length, and in so doing affording them much more legitimacy than they usually deserve; that I have not already used on myself many times over in playing devil's advocate specifically to sharpen and refine my own thinking. 

Also, we live with this. Every single minute of every single hour of every single day. So, you know, we come at these issues from not merely a sanitized academic perspective, devoid of real-world experience, but also down-and-dirty in-the-trenches immersion in the dynamics and their practical effects.

So I've had plenty of opportunity over the decades to reach my conclusions, thanks.

But it's one of those dynamics that I want to discuss here — one that dredged itself up from the depths of my memory during yesterday's discussions. It did not involve anti-Indian racism, but anti-Black racism. But that is, I think, even better for purposes of illustrating this particular point: Perhaps non-Indians who read it will gain a deeper understanding of why, no matter what anyone says, that slur does not honor us.

It's just a little vignette, no more than five minutes out of one day in my life many years ago. It involved two friends, a Black man and a white woman. (Tangentially, it also involved two other women, myself and another friend, both of us with similar racial backgrounds in different proportions; I identify first as Indian, she identifies first as Black. Our immediate role in this little scene was simply that of "witness," but it stuck with both of us.) 

The white woman was one of those who liked to bestow nicknames. She considered her purpose in doing so to be lighthearted and funny, but it really wasn't. As we would eventually come to learn, it was part and parcel of who she was: someone immersed in the bullying tactics and behaviors so prized by the dominant culture, herself victimized by those same tactics expressed in different ways, but so thoroughly immersed in that aspect of the cultural zeitgeist that she felt not merely justified in extending that behavior to others but wanted to be enabled and encouraged in it.

One of her favorites involved use of the term "Boy." It was an equal-opportunity nickname, on the surface; our circle included people of every race, multiple spiritual traditions, and members of the LGBTQI community. For example, one of the [white] guys who was known for liking to drink — a lot — was given the nickname "Party Boy." 

On this day, she informed one of the Black men in our circle that his name was [Whatever] Boy; I can't remember the actual name, other than the use of the word "Boy" in it. The other part, as will become obvious, was irrelevant. His reaction was immediate and unmistakable: offended, yes, but for anyone with an ounce of awareness, the hurt in his eyes was also obvious. Nonetheless, he simply said politely, "No. Please don't call me that, under any circumstances." 

So what was the proper response here?  Oh, that's an easy one, because there is only one. In such a situation, you apologize and concede. Even a toddler understands that there is no reason to hurt someone just because you can.

So did she? Of course not.

No, she kept insisting on the right to call him "[X] Boy," whether he liked it or not, "because [she] wasn't being racist." She insisted that her intent was all that mattered, and since she called all the guys some version of "Boy," irrespective of their race, it was perfectly okay for her to call him that, too.

After being told by more than one person present that it is by definition racist for a white person to call a Black man "boy," she continued to insist that she would still call him that. She even began to mount her High Horse of White Victimhood, the tired old excuse of "How dare you call me a racist; I don't have a racist bone in my body!"

And thus ended the friendship. 

In her mind, she made it about a rhetorical tug-of-war over "rights": her "right" to inflict a name (unasked and unwanted, mind you) on a person who not only did not want it, but was profoundly hurt by it — and to continue to inflict it, simply because she wanted to.

In his mind (and in actuality) she was insisting on the "right" to conjure up in his psyche a collection of images, feelings, and memories, both personal and ancestral: Every single time a white person had called into question, disrespected, belittled and scorned his identity as a Black person, his masculinity as a Black man, his very humanity as an individual. He's African American; does his family tree include men and women held as slaves? It's entirely likely. He lived in the allegedly post-Jim Crow South; does his family history include lynchings? Also entirely possible. Certainly, his history — his own personal history, that of his blood family, that of his ancestors — comprises all of the savagery and violence and humiliation the dominant culture inflicted, with no small amount of glee, on Black people generally and Black men specifically. And as a Black man, he lives daily with the microaggressions that our culture reserves specifically for him.

So every time he hears the word "Boy," I have no doubt that somewhere deep inside, he flinches. His adrenaline levels spike, along with his blood pressure. He sees, feels, the ghosts of the whip and the chain and the rope, and their diluted contemporary equivalent, the unwarranted stop, the frisk, the handcuffs, the bars. 

And that's very much like what WE see, hear, and feel every time someone uses the word "reds***" (and for us women, "s****"). We see the ghosts of our ancestors, massacred, raped, tortured, forcibly marched, interned in camps, lynched, scalped, skinned. We see their body parts being traded for bounties and used for leggings by the same U.S. Cavalry who slaughtered them. We see their genitals being torn off and appropriated as sacrilegious "medicine bags." We see the blankets. We see the genocidal mania that did its best to exterminate our peoples. Closer to home in time, we see the threats of lynching of our own immediate ancestors. We see the daily grinding humiliations: "Red n*****" as an appellation. Forced to step off the sidewalk to defer to a white person. "No Indians or dogs allowed" signs. A little boy, forced to sit in his first-grade classroom, urine streaming down his legs while white classmates jeered, because a racist teacher would not let him get up and use the bathroom.

It's the savageries, large and small. They are real. And they are embodied in our memories, they take modern form, in the word "reds***."