Once Upon a Time. . .

Published 3.28.2012

Once upon a time, the hurling of a racist epithet was evidence of a power imbalance – a situation in which the person being derided often had significantly less power than the hurler; evidence of a system that protected the hurler over the target at almost all turns and unjustly oppressed the target for society’s gain; evidence of a helplessness to really protect oneself and family from the capriciousness of an evil, destructive appetite that sucked up whomever fell into its path.  Those epithets - boy, Nigger, Coon, etc - were painful not because of the biting criticism inherent in their denotations, but because the occasion of the malevolent utterance conjured up and decorated a living violence embedded in this power imbalance – a violent imbalance at the time we often resisted but frequently fell victim to.

Today, when a racist epithet is uttered, often it, too, is evidence of an imbalance – but in the other direction.  For the tide has turned significantly and is still coming about, and those whose dominant and oppressive cultural shore is eroding feel the shift of power, feel the loss of power, feel the redistribution and redefinition of power.  And so they grab feebly, desperately, impotently for words that once were the emblem of their dominance, words that communicated the false superiority they thought their worlds were built upon.  But like their unstable foundation, those words have faltered, decayed, and oxidized to display a persistent metal of truth beneath that reflects the embarrassing visage of their utterer’s smallness.  Now those words are hurled at winners of things, champions of life, the beautiful, matyr’s who have the power to unite nations and worlds – essentially at the powerful from those who are losing it.  What a merciful and just juror time is turning out to be.