The Heart of the Word

The Heart of a Word

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; John 1:1-2

Recently there has been a great deal of debate over Don Imus and his comments about the Rutgers women’s basketball team calling them “nappy headed hos”. I had to sit with this one a while vacillating between dismissal of him as I do so many so called shock jocks to debating with myself on how serious name calling can be especially for someone like myself who has been called out of my name (i.e. punk, sissy, faggot) all of my life. When I heard he’d been fired I was still rather so so about the whole thing. I wasn’t sure if that was overkill or not looking at critics from both sides. I looked at the usual arguments around race which of course are the bulk of them and rarely if ever has anyone brought up the inherent sexism that “hos” implies because so many people across the racial divide don’t really see the issues of how women are treated as really important.

Looking at one web site, I was outdone at the number of whites who sidelined the issue because Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have stepped into the fray and have decided to dismiss and/or apologize for Imus’ behavior like he really didn’t mean it and it was a mere slip of the tongue. Others felt that Imus’ remarks are not to be taken to heart because African Americans haven’t been as forthcoming to defend the Duke Lacrosse players who were accused of gang raping a black stripper and now the charges have been dropped. In addition many of the white posts and some of the black posts consider African Americans to be hypocritical since rappers use the word Nigger and refer to black women in particular as bitches and hos in so much of their music. It turned into finger pointing from both sides, black and white. One side extols the virtues of freedom of speech in this country. The other side says that no one has the freedom to be abusive to anyone.

More deeply, I had to wonder about the idea of a word, any word, that creates hell for so many so completely. Women reel from the word bitch and ho. If men are sexually promiscuous it’s more likely to be a compliment or seen as the way men are fundamentally until at least they’re married—at least that’s the myth so many would like to believe. Same gender loving men and women are called faggots and bull daggers or something even more scathing. It’s always the ones with the least institutionalized power that can easily become targets on the street or in their own homes via physical and verbal abuse, because of a word and what we choose to fill those words up with as we’ve been taught to believe about those different from us.

“In the beginning was the word.” It seems so simple but so many cultures worldwide attribute creation to a single word that calls the creation into being. What so many of us fail to see is how easily the words that we breathe from our mouth can create hell on earth for so many. It’s easy to believe that freedom of speech entails being able to publicly denigrate someone especially if the word has racial and sexual connotations. We all think we should become thick skinned and not let the words hurt, but the words do hurt because they proceed from the human heart and they wound us at heart because all hearts are one having proceeded from a common spiritual source. There are so many ways to call people out of their name even without using words as a definition always precedes a word. The world we live in is built upon denigrating one group or another but often in ways which we rarely make a mental connect.

Women are the least likely to be paid a decent wage for equal work and the most likely to fall through economic cracks along with children since so often children do follow the condition of the mother. The system was not built to extol the virtue of being a woman simply because of birth. It never has been. We’ve been calling women hos for centuries in our own insidious way through our economic and social system. So many talk about families falling apart but no one really stops to see so many people (many of which are people of color and women) who’re working several jobs just to make ends meet without the social constructs in place to raise their children who are left vulnerable to gangs and other temptations in the street. We’ve been calling so many people out of their name simply by the way we deem to see reality and/or God and who gets to be in power.

And that’s the real issue for me. How do we challenge a system where someone deems it okay to call a bunch of women (mostly women of color) nappy headed hos when we all know the racial implications of the words in the first place. Imus knew that and he meant what he said. Whether he intended to hurt or not, his error comes from a deeper well of understanding who is on top in our culture and who is not and nobody ever seems to challenge the system that deems second class citizenship (if any at all) to be problematic. Too many of us are addicted to violence and its consequences to where we’re really not nearly as shocked as we should be by the way people are choosing to live their lives with less the expectation of something better.

A whole lot of people jumped on the wagon screaming bloody murder at Don Imus’ comments and the finger pointing gets sillier and sillier and more confusing because it becomes evident that we’ve all bought into a world not so neatly divided into parts where one person’s living can be separated off from another’s until we’re all hurting. The recent killing of students on the Virginia Tech campus shows us just how much we all suffer together in the end; Cho Seung-Hui killed and wounded men and women from various backgrounds which are reflective of the nature of his pain. It ran cosmic and he became an indiscriminate killer. We’re all disturbed to the core of our souls because we really are one, but in time we’ll forget this common thread of humanity that holds us together in our deepest places because it is rarely nurtured in our culture. Fear has made the divides we live with too comfortable.

We live so easily with a culture rooted in the ethos of hos and bitches and faggots and niggers and chinks and white trash all day and it has become normalized violence that never stays in the nice little niches of our personal lives, on the TV or the radio. It never stays confined to the jokes comedians spew forth on BET comedy shows on radios with shock jocks or in the privacy of our homes. Evil always breaks out to make a connection! Our words travel out into the world unbound and build to critical mass in the most sensitive of us, turns to illness in others or just keeps those of us less prone to pick up a gun and shoot in a state of constant anguish not sure who the enemy is we’re fighting that we can’t quite see but feel everywhere; that kind of anger turns to illness later, either physical or mental. More and more of us are on anti-depressants or are suffering from anxiety or drowning ourselves in sex, drugs (legal and illegal), toxic relationships or food just to cope. We live perpetually with the violence of words and nobody seems to notice how words shape our world into an even uglier place than that of our parents, yet we have more freedom of movement now than ever but less the means to move about when funds are hard to come by, the rich are getting richer and smaller as a group, and the poor are enlarging their borders to receive more and more refugees in an economic war so many of us have already lost. Way too many of us human beings are suffering from a level of existential angst that’s breeding more suicides and murderers than the news can keep up with.

We shouldn’t be standing by waiting for Don Imus to apologize or get fired and think that the real issue has been dealt with because it has not. We’re all guilty of accepting a world built up out of prejudice and hatred and words that bind our lives like bars in a prison cell. We’re all guilty of accepting an America that is built up out of the lie that what we say is not really real, is not really volatile, so why should anyone’s actions be deemed any more important? Actions and words are one. In the beginning was the word and the word became flesh? Sound familiar? It’s no more right for Imus, rappers or anyone else as par for the course to refer to women as bitches and hos, women to refer to other women as “females” as if they were dogs, gays as faggots, lesbians as bull daggers, black folks as niggers, white folks as trailer park trash and somehow lose sight of the fact that our words and perceptions only end up chaining us all to a collective suffering from which none of us can easily be extricated.

“In the beginning was the Word” and we are one as that Word implies, created from a common source and responsible to that source and one another because of it. Such a reality is considered too lofty for most when black folks are in conflict whether or not to love their same gender loving sons and daughters or God as if the two were as opposite as evil and good. White folks fear releasing so much of the power they’ve wrongly acquired from their ancestors because they were white and live in constant fear that people of color will seek revenge. Men have to let go wholeheartedly of their need to believe that women were created for them as if they couldn’t be whole human beings outside of male dominance. Black men really need to get over their pissing game with white men over the power they have over so many; that kind of power should be nobody’s goal to hold as total power corrupts totally! We really do need each other when it’s all said and done. Not just to survive, but to truly learn to live.

Don Imus wasn’t right. So called race leaders aren’t right to only open their mouth for particular kinds of human pain and not for others. It’s not right for white people to go on the defensive to delineate the many white people who’ve suffered to counter the destructive power of racism. None of us can afford to think that somehow we’re all even stewing together in a huge pot of suffering. Nothing changes because way too many of us, across racial lines and lines of sex, have accepted the status quo. Way too many of us have accepted things as they are and just hope that the pain and suffering of others is not contagious like the flu or a cold. It doesn’t work that way, not from my perspective of God.

A whole world comes into being with a single word and then we all have to live with it but the catch is what word and what worlds will we create? We’re responsible for every blessing and curse that emanates from our mouths and that power that adds and grows to a larger evil just waiting to break out in concentration camps, serial killers, mass murderers, rapes, and beating folks to death because the church or society says it’s okay. At the rate we’re going we’re breaking our neck to get to an apocalyptic finish line that will be the end of us all. We’re suffering from a distorted view of reality that somehow believes that suffering remains where it was last seen, that what hurts my neighbor has nothing to do with me, that because I am Christian that I’m absolutely right and somehow exonerated from any responsibility to the whole wide world. We’ve got some serious and profound work to do in this world and if it were only as easy as firing Don Imus what a wonderful world this would be.

c. Raphael—God has healed
© 2007