Language and Bigotry

President Obama finds himself yet again at the center of another flare up in America's enduring discourse on race and racism. As if being elected the first "African American" president of the United States wasn't enough, Obama, through his words and his mere presence has unwittingly agitated the tension that lies beneath this country's thin epidermal layer of racial harmony and tranquility. This time the controversy surrounds the outburst of Republican congressmen Joe Wilson, who yelled "you lie" during President Obama's address to the House. Clearly the rules of decorum were badly broken and it was an embarrassing moment for the House, but was it racially motivated? It seems an absurd conclusion on the basis of the outburst alone, but in America this seems to be a valid corollary and question deserving conversation and debate.

To this writer, the only thing an uncontained and uncensored emotional outburst such as this suggests is a level of dislike and distaste for the message and/or the messenger. Nothing about the underlying motive can be reasonably deduced from the content - "you lie" does not in any way translate to "you lie because you are black."

That's why Jimmy Carter's comments on this episode are so unfortunate - just as Obama's comment on the inappropriateness of police conduct in the very legitimate arrest of Harvard Professor Henry Gates was unfortunate. The issue of racism, bigotry and xenophobia are very real and very much alive in America but to invoke them where they don't belong dilutes the value of the discourse and debate when the clear, legitimate and egregious violations do occur. And they occur plenty often and deserve our serious attention as a mature enlightened society.

What we need to focus our energies and attention on is not the individual flare ups but the lexicon of the debate - dig deep into the words and one cannot conclude anything but enduring tribalism and bigotry engrained in many of us. Well intentioned people speak of "tolerance and acceptance" as if that should be our ultimate goal as a society - to "put up with" ethnic differences. Wouldn't a more worthy goal be to embrace and cherish ethnic differences? Wouldn't it be better if the next time a Joe Wilson gets wrongly accused he responds "my brothers and I were raised by our parents to respect others because of our different backgrounds" instead of "my brothers and I were raised by our parents to respect others regardless of our different backgrounds." Doesn't "regardless" imply that some backgrounds may be more deserving of respect than others but that we should respect them all anyway?

I know what Joe Wilson meant and I'm sure he's a decent man with good intentions who was not remotely motivated by race in his outburst. What I worry about content of his rebuttal and the content of our entire dialogue around race and racism. It's time we put much more thought in how we speak about it and what that means about where we're headed. Words matter at the level of physiology - the word "happy" lights up a different part of the human brain than does the word "sad" and elicits different neurochemical and therefore psychological responses. Play a little thought exercise, close your eyes and think of a person ethnically different from yourself and think of the word "tolerate". Now open your eyes, close them again and think of the same person and think "cherish". Notice any difference? You may not immediately but make that association over and over and your brain will become wired to elicit a different response the next time you think of that very person.

We need to change our standard and our language if we are ever going to be effective as a society in creating greater ethnic and racial cohesion. Particularly when it comes to our children - child development research has shown that there is a critical period during the early years of development when language forms and that language is intricately linked with further development of the brain and the hardwiring that takes place over the years into adolescence.