Sticks and stones
The latest dust-up in the Des Moines news media regarding the state legislature stems from a comment made by my home district's senator, Jack Hatch, to my district representative, Ako Abdul-Samad, on the floor of the house chamber last week.Hatch, who is white, used the word "nigger" during a conversation with Abdul-Samad, who is black. The senator used the word to describe how he felt the two men were collectively being treated by the party leadership over a proposed plan by the pair to make health care more accessible in the state. Hatch has issued multiple apologies in the wake of the incident, and Abdul-Samad said that the incident had provided what he called "a teaching moment."
"The village isn't OK," Abdul-Samad was quoted as saying in the Des Moines Register, "What has happened... is that through Sen. Jack Hatch that we do still have some issues. And the key is once we've realized these issues are still in effect, what do we do? Do we take it and take our anger and send it one direction, or do we take our anger and make it a teaching moment, an educational moment?"
Abdul-Samad's spirit of conciliation is spot-on. This is indeed a teaching moment. But what exactly is the lesson to be learned? Words have power, yes, but they only have the power that we allow them to have. In this instance, in fact, I'm not sure why Hatch even feels compelled to apologize. He didn't call Abdul-Samad "a nigger," or use the word in anger towards him. He used the phrase in what we refer to as a "context"- a context, in this case, that seems to me actually acknowledges the historic impact of the word. Words themselves can be only neutral.
The Register won't print the word "nigger" in reference to this story I guess because either they feel we don't know it, because they're being politically safe, or because they think that the word actually has a chance one day of going away. Well, as to the latter, guess what-- the word will never go away as long as it continues to be supplied with so much power. That's the one way, in fact, to make sure that it never goes away.
A new generation of young people, particularly African-Americans, have come to realize this. They've been busy creating the next American society in which this label and others, like "white trash" and "fag", have been claimed by the people who were once almost always on the receiving end of the epithet. We're all the better for this evolving standard.
Hatch's use of the word, a dirty bomb of distraction in the local news media, may go to show-- more than anything else-- just how much it's the new generation of Iowans that are most underrepresented in the legislature.
Local Reverend Keith Ratliff, president of the regional NAACP-- ironically, an organization whose name itself suggests a preferred group label now out of public favor-- lamented Monday that people "still use derogatory language against other individuals," as if such a thing could ever be eradicated, and Linda Carter-Lewis, president of the Des Moines NAACP branch, warned that Hatch would still "suffer the consequences for his actions."
Any words placed together for the purpose of expressing a thought or idea have the potential to offend, and African-Americans in a position of political leadership don't have a monopoly on providing enlightenment to the general populace. Bigots come in all colors and creeds, as the public campaign for California's Proposition 8 last year demonstrated.
Sadly, I fear that Hatch's offense-- one that was committed, incidently, by one of the state senate's most committed and progressive members-- will somehow linger longer in the memories of the local NAACP leadership than will the offense of the Democratic majority leadership stripping Hatch's expanded health care proposal, the action that led to Hatch's comment to begin with and that will actually wind up hurting African-American residents of Iowa worse than a simple uttered word.
posted by CM @ 12:59 PM
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