“Lousy language”: that’s what one male character called it in Anna Deavere Smith’s one-woman show, “Fires in the Mirror,” based on interviews with residents in a racially polarized Brooklyn neighborhood. We, to whom race is so important, he says, should have more words for it; Eskimos have many words for snow. Conscious not only of what language people use but how they use it, Smith told Charlayne Hunter-Gault on " The MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour" that people who had strong feelings about what Sister Souljah said should talk to her, not about her. Smith reminded viewers that Souljah is a young artist whose vision is " in process" and will be affected by the responses she receives.
With all the hoopla and the hype, we forget that. And very few of us know just how difficult it is to talk about race. We haven’t learned how. There are no drills for it in school, like times tables, and rarely do we get beyond the most superficial discussion of vocabulary. Black, Negro, African-American, people of color. That’s about as far as we get. If we don’t stumble or lapse into silence, we talk past each other. Was the trouble in Los Angeles “a riot” or “an uprising”? Some of both, actually, but it takes a common language, perspective, even trust, to say that.
Because we know so little of our racial history together, we cannot recognize the clues that our language is giving us. We cannot hear in the go slow rhetoric of racial conservatives the echo of one of the earliest abolitionists who believed “that an abhorrence of slavery would gradually work its way, and that it was the duty ofthe society patiently to wait the event.” Without recognizing how very old are the counsels of patience, we are unable to hear how old, too, are the expressions of African-American frustration. On July 4,1852, Frederick Douglass said this about finding language to touch white Americans: “At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. Oh! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would today pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder.”
Ralph Wiley writes in his provocative book of essays, “Why Black People Tend to Shout” (1991): “When a sweet grandmotherly sort has to tell you how black people were once chained in iron masks in the canebrake, to keep them from eating the cane while they harvested it, and that these masks were like little ovens that cooked the skin off their faces-when you … realize she was once a girl who might have been your girl, and someone caused this pain on her lips and nobody did anything about it but keep living-this gives you a tendency to shout, especially when confronted by … a smarmy talk show host.”
There’s also our American legacy of avoidance, chronicled by the scholar, editor and activist W.E.B. Du Bois. “They say,” he writes in “The Souls of Black Folk….. I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.”
Our history and our present have taught us that the language we use to talk about race can vary widely from our behavior. The word diversity, which is in vogue these days, ought to indicate wide variety but is often used by companies, schools and universities to mean two African-Americans in a group of 50 whites. There are all the code words, used principally by politicians to whip fear and ignorance into votes: Willie Horton, law and order, welfare cheats.
It’s the language of stereotype, the American shorthand that keeps the discussion, and people, circumscribed. In the 1930s, Sterling Brown drew up seven categories of “Negro Character as Seen by White Authors,” including The Contented Slave, The Brute Negro, The Tragic Mulatto, The Exotic Primitive. Cornel West, a professor at Princeton University, has said that because of stereotypes, black people “rarely get free of the fear of white gaze, the fear of black put-down, the fear of stepping out on their own… At the same time, there is a fear of failure, because your stereotypical image is that black people are always failing; there is also a fear that if you are successful you will be too alienated from black people, since you have failed to fall into a stereotype.”
As my friend Marcyliena Morgan says, “Sometimes the whole situation makes you want to curl up in the corner and moan and groan and sing Negro spirituals.” She says it, but, fact is, she’s a linguist–a student of words. We need more of them, not less; more words, more students. I certainly do not want more talk of killing. What I do want is language: fighting words, love poems, elegance, dissonance, dissing, signifying, alarms, whistles, scholarly texts, political oratory, the works. Without it, we’re dead.
