Sticks and stones may break my bones
But words will never hurt me.
There’s power in little ditties such as these. They have such cultural currency that we typically don’t stop to wonder whether or not they’re true. In fact, we may not even notice if they’re linguistically nonsensical or patently insulting. The pot should never call the kettle black, right? What do we have to believe about “black” in order for that one to make sense? In this election season, the “sticks and stones” ditty has been top of mind for me. This one manages to be simultaneously untrue and apparent. Name-calling or misnaming has never been intended to break bones – at least not in a proximal sense. Instead, name-calling is intended to break spirits, to siphon off energy, and dissipate joy. It functions to signal disrespect.
You can imagine how much I enjoyed that moment during the Democratic convention when actor Kerry Washington brought two young girls on stage to teach attendees how to pronounce VP Harris’ first name using the punctuation mark (,) and the syllable “la”. To paraphrase Washington, we can understand “confusion” about an uncommon name, but we cannot tolerate disrespect. It’s understandable when “confusion” leads to mispronunciation. To be completely honest, however, I also question persistent confusion, especially since the misnaming sometimes happens among her most ardent supporters. In these instances, absolutely no disrespect is intended. So what makes it hard to say her name? I wonder then if the mispronunciation is triggered by some level of societal discomfort or unsettled expectation. I wonder if the confusion signals the power of racialized notions of place and possibility. For example, in the racially segregated South, polite White Southerners seemed to experience serious speech impediments when they needed to pronounce two phonemes (nee + gro) together. Somehow, the word would escape their lips as nig-gra. I also wonder why never once have I heard the fairly uncommon name Melania pronounced as Mel-a-ne-a. I have to admit that I’m uncomfortable talking about these two women in the same paragraph. However, my point is this: the ease with which we employ and accept language is tied to our immersion in a cultural narrative. In many instances, it’s not even about consciously held principles. However, language signals culturally embodied beliefs about who belongs where, who may be “strange” and who unsettles expectations about their cultural “place”.
Sticks and stones and names and words all hurt, particularly when they are operating in service of power-over hierarchies. In power-over hierarchies, words are weaponized to assert, establish, and fortify dominance. Why else would the MAGA candidate in this election so insist upon slapping unflattering nicknames on anyone who dares to oppose him (e.g. Crooked Hillary, Sleepy Joe)? Folks who presume their right to domination over others also presume the right to determine how those “Others” can be known. In short, “You are who I say you are”. A searing example of this tactic was portrayed in the 1976 television miniseries “Roots”. It is nearly impossible to unsee the scene in which the overseer whips the character Kunta Kinte until he submits to his slave name “Toby”. The words don’t have to make sense. In fact, the name-calling is not even supposed to make sense. They are meant to mystify and obscure reality, to appeal to the feral urge to protect dominance. The more feral the urge, the more crass the name-calling. That explains in part why the MAGA candidate and his minions have resorted to referring to VP Harris as a “ho”. Whether crass or subtle, the functions of weaponized language remain the same:
- to dehumanize (i.e. to transmute a person from a “who” to a “what”; to strip persons of their particularity and complexity);
- to disempower (i.e. to constrict the boundaries of possibility – after all, “they” must be kept in their “place”);
- to distract and divide (i.e. to shift the focus of attention away from germane issues to those that serve the interests of the presumptive dominators).
Mind you, there is often no sharp demarcation between crass and subtle, ill-intentioned, or mindlessly benign. A few months ago, actor Drew Barrymore drew stinging criticism for suggesting that the country needs VP Harris as their “Mamala”. There is no doubt that Barrymore made the comment in the spirit of admiration. However – and it’s a big however – her words reflected the culturally embodied stereotype of the Black woman as Mammy, even to those who enslave and oppress her. In her book Fierce Angels: The Strong Black Woman in American Life and Culture, the author Sheri Parks reports an experience similar to the Barrymore-Harris exchange. Upon learning that she would serve as a first-year academic dean to his college son, a white father exulted that “There’s nothing like being taken care of by a Black woman!” Poet Alice Walker captures the necessity of overriding this relentless narrative when the protagonist Janie Crawford refuses to take the role of Mammy or mule. Ill-intention is not required to perpetuate entrapping narratives. And really, has any white male vice president, from John Adams to Joe Biden, ever been asked to be “mama” to this nation?
On the morning following the close of the Democratic convention, a front-page editorial in the New York Times declared Joy Is Not a Strategy. Really? In the spirit of “fair and balanced”, what about hatred, fear, and grievance as a strategy? Using lightly weaponized language as headlines sells newspapers. It also does dirty work. Really? A woman with unimpeachable career accomplishments believes that she can hop-skip her way into the White House? How witless might she be? Might she be reminiscent of Prissy? That particular headline echoes comments by right-wing extremists who describe the VP as “not a hard worker”. That particular headline resonates with the narrative of the undeserving Welfare Queen. Any minoritized person who has ever been confronted with the “what are you guys laughing about” question knows that black joy is scary to white supremacists. That particular query is highly reminiscent of the Juneteenth injunctions announced by Colonel Granger in 1865: the formerly enslaved women and men were commanded to return quietly to their homes; expressions of joy and merriment were strictly prohibited. As my colleague Dr. Amy Banks has noted, joy is incompatible with fear. To presumptive dominators, joy among the minoritized portends loss of control. It is no surprise then that much has been made of the vice president’s “strange laugh”. (By the way, joy is fine so long as it’s served up as minstrelsy or entertainment.) As one MAGA operative put it, her emotionality is indicative of her “weakness” and “incompetence”. It bears mentioning (again) that even ardent supporters have expressed worry that her laughter compromises her viability as a presidential candidate. Hence, we see the doubled-edged damage of stereotypes that masquerade as race-neutral (read: largely disingenuous) language: not only are the particularities of the targeted person invisibilized, but also the biases and anxieties of the linguistic architect. These words combine to paint a single portrait of the vice president as a frivolous, fickle woman whose leadership cannot be trusted. And there you have all of the elements of the cultural narrative embodied by one mixed race and only-in-the-USA “Black” woman: Mammy, Jezebel, Prissy, and Welfare Queen. Without a doubt, words can be as violating and violent as sticks and stones, particularly when they evoke narratives that are deeply embedded in our cultural consciousness and embodied through our nervous systems. During this election season and for the foreseeable months after, we must prepare our mind-bodies for relentless assault.
There are a few practices we might try if we are to hold onto our power and our joy during these racially corrosive times. Let’s start with a “don’t”. As in, don’t try to make logical sense of the name-calling, the misnaming, and the lies that we hear. Again, in the world of power-over politics, words are used to mystify, distract, and confuse. Neither should we waste too much of our time taking pleasure at the MAGA candidate’s incoherence. His words are doing exactly what they are intended to do: to evoke rage and fear. His words have never been directed to the cerebral cortex. Instead, they are meant to incite ferality: an urge to protect self-interest, however misguided, by any means necessary.
Second, we must recognize that the Civil War and January 6th are not aberrations in our shared history. They are ever-reverberating ruptures at the core of our body politic. There have been truces (far more apparent than real) and mighty forces of resistance, the war to permanently subjugate or erase minoritized citizens has never ended. It is not an aberration that the National Federation of Republican Assemblies went to the Supreme Court invoking the notorious Dred Scott decision to bar Harris, Haley, and Ramaswamy from the electoral ballot. The gist of their argument relied on the infamous ruling by the fifth Chief Justice Roger Taney: that these three brown-skinned Americans, born in California, South Carolina, and Ohio, have no rights that any white citizen is bound to respect. Our vaunted myths about equal justice and unfettered liberty for all cannot conceal the white supremacist ethos indelibly imprinted on our collective consciousness. White supremacy relies upon the protection of a racialized hierarchy that holds the super-species and a sub-species of humanity firmly in their presumptive “places”. We must expose the mystifying narratives that provide cover for systematized injustices. Racism, no matter how genteel or intellectualized, is still soul rot. So-called civility is cowardice when it means refusing to fact-check lies (looking at you CNN). In response to MAGA/ Project 2025 battle plans, too many times we hear plaintive questions like “why do people vote against their own interests? “and how can more than 50% of the nation support the MAGA figurehead? This well-intentioned hand-wringing will not save us in this civil war. Until we clearly name who comprises that more than 50%, such questions are mere virtue signals. Believe me, that 55% was not just uneducated, unemployed, or low-wage white men, nor was it that negligible (and in my view misguided) cluster of minoritized citizens.
We must recognize that the language with which we feel most comfortable often functions to silence us. Who can argue with phrases like “fair and balanced”? Well, we must when a media outlet uses the term to elevate lies in hopes of gaining market share with claims of political diversity. “Right to work” sounds like something everyone should have until we actually speak with an itinerant farm worker or an underpaid worker on an assembly line. Only when we question the language do we recognize that “right to work” legitimates inequitable power whereby employers have nearly unfettered access to the bodies of the workers, while the workers themselves may not have access to a water or a bathroom break. Similarly, we might question why legislated words like “entitlements” (read: unearned) refer to free lunches and Medicaid/Medicare, but not to corporate tax breaks and executive bonuses.
Words are weapons of mass destruction in a civil war, no matter how subterranean that war might appear. We who believe in freedom must do the work of neutralizing the languages of division, obfuscation, oppression, and erasure. This is the work of making history, and in the words of Frederick Douglass, “There is so much history yet to be made”. This is the work of “good trouble”, of finding a way to get in the way of the dehumanizing forces that hide inside our political discourse as well as our polite conversations. This is the work of doing something to protect and foster our families, our communities, and our inextricably interconnected humanity.
