Difficult words
Jul. 16th, 2008 09:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vcmwWorking with teens at my library is, as it should be, a vast learning experience for me. The teens who participate are thoughtful people who make meaningful comments. And then I chew on those comments.
Today I'm chewing on how the effect of language is different for people based on their cultural background. This has been widely discussed for words that are blatant epithets (as racial slurs, curse words, etc) but I am thinking about the importance of words that aren't necessarily epithets but that carry a strong weight of association.
Ok, this is a stupid white girl moment, but the word in question here is "lynch." The reason it came up for discussion, oddly, was because I was asking my Teen Advisory Group for input on a card game.
The card game in question is called "Are you a werewolf", and it was one that had been mentioned on one of my young adult library service listservs as cheap and fun, so I bought a pack and brought it for the TAG to take a look at and see if they would want to play it sometime. I was reading the instructions out loud. I'd glanced over the instructions before but hadn't read them carefully. I got to a point where the instructions said that the villagers lynch people they think might be werewolves.
My Teen Advisory Group is pretty diverse. There was a pause while several of the members looked at me. Their faces said "did you really just say that? As if it were nothing? Really?". I laughed uncomfortably. We did not decide to play the "Are You A Werewolf" game.
[We did have a conversation about other contexts of the word 'lynch'. My TAG group had not realized the word HAD other contexts than specifically relating to white-on-black American violence. It was, as far as I could tell, the only situation they'd ever heard the word used in. ]
Why didn't the word jump out at me as clearly inappropriate when I was reading through the instructions on my own, before the meeting? At first I wanted to tell myself I just didn't think how strongly "lynch" is tied to specifically the African-Amerian experience of oppression in the U.S., but I think it's deeper than that - I was perfectly well aware of the extent of killings in the South, of the use of language like that in making threats even in the present day in the North (a truckload of rednecks in my town from my high school actually drove around while I was in high school a decade ago threatening to "lynch" a local African-American kid after a basketball game). But some part of my brain flinches away from building the association. It's more comfortable with the use of the word in, like, Westerns and European-ish historical novels and stuff. My brain tried to be all defensive about it, like "oh, that's just a word for a method of execution by hanging, yeah, with connotations of lawlessness and vigilantism, ok, well, that goes with how the card game says it's a game of "mob rule"."
I'm sure this is painfully obvious to most people but it didn't occur to me until that moment: if you're an African-American teen in the United States, you don't have the luxury of flinching away from the association. "Lynch" is a word with a very narrow, very bad set of associations. It is not just a word for a method of execution, it carries with it all this freight about who is getting executed and why and by whom.
So, yeah. The importance of language, context, association, cultural power, isolation vs. community - these are topics that never go away. And they will turn up whenever you stop paying attention and looking out for them. In moments like picking random cheap card games for group activities.
All the teens were very nice about pointing out that they found this word fatally inappropriate, and not holding it too much against me. Then we had a really good discussion about word usage in books at our next Teen Book Club.
[The Teen Book Club discussion was sparked by the moment with the card game the day before, but was focused on uses of the n-word in novels like Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird. The explanation of this got overedited because I was feeling unsure how much of book club discussion I wanted to share online. Also, fatally inappropriate is my reading of their reaction, in the same way that I tend to describe being two days late with a thank you note as a fatal social error. Normal social filter translation: they were like: Hunh. Weird. Well let's not. Ok, Moving On.] The teens talked about how words with strongly negative connotations have their own weight - they want to be given the option to expose themselves to those words or not, and then they think that if they're used (like if reading out loud a historical novel that has, for historically relevant/thematically important reasons used racially charged language) there should be an appropriate pause, to acknowledge the weight of the word.
They're very sensitive and astute perceivers of language. It's good to listen to them.
Today I'm chewing on how the effect of language is different for people based on their cultural background. This has been widely discussed for words that are blatant epithets (as racial slurs, curse words, etc) but I am thinking about the importance of words that aren't necessarily epithets but that carry a strong weight of association.
Ok, this is a stupid white girl moment, but the word in question here is "lynch." The reason it came up for discussion, oddly, was because I was asking my Teen Advisory Group for input on a card game.
The card game in question is called "Are you a werewolf", and it was one that had been mentioned on one of my young adult library service listservs as cheap and fun, so I bought a pack and brought it for the TAG to take a look at and see if they would want to play it sometime. I was reading the instructions out loud. I'd glanced over the instructions before but hadn't read them carefully. I got to a point where the instructions said that the villagers lynch people they think might be werewolves.
My Teen Advisory Group is pretty diverse. There was a pause while several of the members looked at me. Their faces said "did you really just say that? As if it were nothing? Really?". I laughed uncomfortably. We did not decide to play the "Are You A Werewolf" game.
[We did have a conversation about other contexts of the word 'lynch'. My TAG group had not realized the word HAD other contexts than specifically relating to white-on-black American violence. It was, as far as I could tell, the only situation they'd ever heard the word used in. ]
Why didn't the word jump out at me as clearly inappropriate when I was reading through the instructions on my own, before the meeting? At first I wanted to tell myself I just didn't think how strongly "lynch" is tied to specifically the African-Amerian experience of oppression in the U.S., but I think it's deeper than that - I was perfectly well aware of the extent of killings in the South, of the use of language like that in making threats even in the present day in the North (a truckload of rednecks in my town from my high school actually drove around while I was in high school a decade ago threatening to "lynch" a local African-American kid after a basketball game). But some part of my brain flinches away from building the association. It's more comfortable with the use of the word in, like, Westerns and European-ish historical novels and stuff. My brain tried to be all defensive about it, like "oh, that's just a word for a method of execution by hanging, yeah, with connotations of lawlessness and vigilantism, ok, well, that goes with how the card game says it's a game of "mob rule"."
I'm sure this is painfully obvious to most people but it didn't occur to me until that moment: if you're an African-American teen in the United States, you don't have the luxury of flinching away from the association. "Lynch" is a word with a very narrow, very bad set of associations. It is not just a word for a method of execution, it carries with it all this freight about who is getting executed and why and by whom.
So, yeah. The importance of language, context, association, cultural power, isolation vs. community - these are topics that never go away. And they will turn up whenever you stop paying attention and looking out for them. In moments like picking random cheap card games for group activities.
All the teens were very nice about pointing out that they found this word fatally inappropriate, and not holding it too much against me. Then we had a really good discussion about word usage in books at our next Teen Book Club.
[The Teen Book Club discussion was sparked by the moment with the card game the day before, but was focused on uses of the n-word in novels like Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird. The explanation of this got overedited because I was feeling unsure how much of book club discussion I wanted to share online. Also, fatally inappropriate is my reading of their reaction, in the same way that I tend to describe being two days late with a thank you note as a fatal social error. Normal social filter translation: they were like: Hunh. Weird. Well let's not. Ok, Moving On.] The teens talked about how words with strongly negative connotations have their own weight - they want to be given the option to expose themselves to those words or not, and then they think that if they're used (like if reading out loud a historical novel that has, for historically relevant/thematically important reasons used racially charged language) there should be an appropriate pause, to acknowledge the weight of the word.
They're very sensitive and astute perceivers of language. It's good to listen to them.
