In Response

I recieved an email yesterday that struck a chord. It wasn't particularly offensive or false, nor did it say anything that I haven't thought of myself. It was about something that everyone can identify with and has a strong opinion about. It is global. It is local. It has permeated our speech but nobody talks about it. Everyone has a solution but nothing is being done.

I'm talking about racism.

The email was from a white person's perspective talking about how they are the ones who are censored the most and thought to be the most racist at the same time. It says how unfair it is that white people aren't allowed to use certain language because it would be considered racist, but other races can get away with using the same language without social penalty.

I agree with this, and I agreed with the email. Of course my description is a lot less offensive than the email, but you get the jist of it. The reason I mention this at all (though I find it to be a continuing problem that not one singular person could fix) is because there IS a solution. The way to identify a solution is to figure out why the problem exists in the first place, and why it continues.

The problem has existed since man has been able to see color and use it as an excuse to separate each other. Then came slavery and human exploitation, and all that crap. Then religion was created to help man better cope with the terrors of life, and IT was exploited. Then like all aspects of life, these exploitations carried on through growing populations and took on new meanings as language and human standards evolved. Lots and lots of things happened, people were offended, and now we're all separated by race, sex, gender, political affiliation, border, occupation, social status, style, paycheck, taste, and name.

Because all this has happened, we have made it personal. We are angry. Our anger is so palpable we have issued laws trying to prevent us from feeling it. But it continues to boil inside of us because nothing is actually being done by being reminded of it every time we turn the corner. We are furthering the problem by not battling the real issues, and covering them up by issuing new laws.

We need change and we need it now.

The only way we can get passed this problem is the same way to get passed any problem: allow it to. We need to stop taking offense to absolutely everything and look at things a little more objectively. The problem is not that we are all racist, it's that we use racist language and talk about how offensive it is. Because language itself is subjective (personal), we take offense to the simplest of phrases without thinking what was actually meant. We're looking for it and finding it everywhere.

What if we stop looking?
What if we start looking passed it and stop taking offense?
Learn, grow, and become better people because of it.

It's like being a little sister. I wasn't cool enough to hang out with my older brothers and their friends because I was their little sister. They would call me names to prove to their friends that they had control over me, and they knew they had control over me because it kept me away. I didn't want to be around them if they were just going to call me names. They knew it worked and continued to do it because it worked. But they were my brothers, and there was nothing in the world that was going to change it. There was also nothing in the world that was going to keep me from wanting to hang out with them. My solution? I rose above the ridicule. I showed them that calling me names wasn't going to keep me away from them, and I stopped taking offense to "hollis" and "horsely" and "that's just my dumb little sister." When I stopped taking offense to the words they were using, they realized they didn't have the same control over me, so they stopped using the language. Today we are the best of friends and I owe it to the fact that we were able to get passed the petty name-calling. Of course they still tease me by calling me "hollis" sometimes, but I know they love me and it is all in good humor.

The way to get passed racist language is to stop using it. It only exists because people keep using it. In a perfect world, I could say "stop using racist language" and people would. If everyone in the world right now stopped using racist language for the rest of their lives, their children would not even know it existed in the first place. Of course it will always exist because there are too many publications citing such language, and I would only hope my children cracked a book once in a while. So it's obviously impossible to eradicate such offensive language, but it's not impossible to stop using it.

We would need to stop using it together, all across the world, at the same time.

But it will never happen because there will always be rapists, there will always be murder and guns, there will always be violence against someone, there will always be an opposing side to good, and there will always be offensive language.

I just choose not to use it.

How about you?