Unbecoming, or, Just Words

There are some words I don’t use, and it’s not because I’m humorless. Some words make me uncomfortable. This has been a recurring intellectual problem for me, and I’ve had to confront it here in Ukraine since I arrived. The other morning, I was chatting in English with a Russian-speaking college student who speaks broken English rapidly and wanted to practice. Let’s call him Sasha. I told him that I had awoken that morning from a dream in which I was one of Barack Obama’s grade school confidantes, and that I had been walking the halls of the White House engaged in who-likes-who level discourse. (I guess all the CNN talk about Obamamania – is that the coinage? – has seeped through to the point that my subconscious thinks it is best girlfriends with this admittedly likeable politician. Anyway.) Sasha said that he had heard on the news that Obama won’t stand a chance in the general election because Americans “will not vote for a n****.” (It frightens me even to write that much, even if it’s in quotes.) I told Sasha that I heard a different statistic and then I told him not to use that word. The clip that CNN World Edition has been replaying over the last two days features Hillary pushing her “talking not doing” critique of Obama, and Obama responding with part of that speech that he borrowed in which the formula is: 1. Insert famous line (We hold these truths to be self-evident/I have a dream/Ich bin ein Berliner/life, liberty, property/fear itself/etc … 2. Crowd erupts in applause 3. Speaker, derisively: “Just words?” 4. Crowd continues to erupt. It’s a good and obvious rhetorical tactic (Thanks, Cicero!). The great irony, of course, is that taking any of those famous utterances out of their context only works because of the famous actions they accompanied. FDR or MLK or JFK were people facing real situations when they said those words. But then so is Obama - so good for him for using other people’s words to remind us that all of this is just overheated pre-real-situation talk. Just words? The man’s got a point. Words may be arbitrary signs and all that, but they’re also dense catalogs of meaning. Words are some of the most public and the most personal items we possess. The meaning of a word is layered with the history of that word’s currency in our own lives as much as its wrapped up in its social history: of literature, speech, or a genre like hip-hop. Every time I try out a new word I’m as conscious of it as if it’s a new wig I’ve just put on. (How does it look?) Every time I dredge up a ten-dollar word I’m sensitive to it. (Am I pretentious now?) Every time I hear Bush's mid-sentence hem-and-haw, hear the wheels in his brain turn, I think about the word that's gone missing. I’m aware of how other people use words, especially at weird times: a flashy word in a kindergarten class, academic jargon while ice-skating, an archaic term in a pop song, or a mundane word lodged in a sophisticated critique. (A professor who always referred to good writing as “nice” comes to mind.) I’m sensitive to words in context most of the time. I imagine it’s the same way for most of us who care about words and know how powerful they can be. So, back to my problem: I got flustered. Sasha blew my defensiveness off as an absurd PC-ism, an American tic. He said, “How come if they can say it to each other all the time I can’t use it. Jay-Z, Nelly, 50 Cent, Kholi-vud - they all use it.” I pointed out that it’s a specific context, that Obama would never refer to himself using the term, just as Hillary would never designate herself a “ho.” Eep. I pointed out that this has been a contentious issue even within the hip-hop world, if you remember that ban proposed by Russell Simmons a few years ago and the T-shirt debacle from last week. (CNN, my only friend…). Sasha didn’t care. I warned him against ever using the term because people will misunderstand him. He shrugged. This went on for a while. I resorted to berating him (not a debate tactic endorsed by Cicero, I think). My behavior grew to be не красиво, as people here like to say, which my instinct translates as “unbecoming,” but is probably literally closer to “not beautiful” (it’s tricky to find the exact right words). I felt blindly righteous on this point. And then, later in the day, I got to thinking about Ching Chong Song. Ching Chong Song is a band that I got hooked on a few months ago. (Susan’s playing with them now, which makes it even better.) They are surprising performers, authors of really interesting strange music, and nice people to boot. They are not Chinese. (Would it be different if they were?) Their songs have nothing to do with Asia. They are not people who hate other people. But they are passionate. They are not naïve. They did not set out to provoke anybody, I think, but they did. Their band name has been in the center of a controversy: they’ve been protested at Bryn Mawr College and at NYU and just this past weekend, had a gig cancelled because a half-Asian bandmember of another band on the bill felt uncomfortable. Susan told me that she wrote a letter to the guy in the other band to explain why she doesn’t have a problem playing with Ching Chong Song. I asked to see it, then I asked her if I could post part of it on my blog. She said yes: “The way I see it, yes, "Ching Chong" is a racial slur. It was created out of ignorance. It's a dumb term created and used by people who let their stupidity and fear have the better of them. That's how we originally experienced these words. But Ching Chong Song is not a racist band. They're simply not. I think the juxtaposition of the band name with the kind of band that Ching Chong Song is points out the silliness of the term and could even have an inoculating kind of effect on it. To me, this is empowering if anything. We can't erase the term "ching chong" from the American vocabulary. It's like trying to erase knowledge of unpleasant things like how to make weapons or historical events where people were mistreated. I, as an Asian American, don't see the need to obliterate any words at all, but perhaps change how we relate to them and hopefully change how we relate to each other. And (as cheesy as this sounds) I think one of the ways to change how we relate to each other as human beings is by creating rich and true music. And Ching Chong Song creates some of the most inventive and beautiful music I've heard.” Later, in a letter to me, Susan wrote, “What do we do with these words that were used to hurt people? Or that represent ignorant, hurtful thought? I think it's a sensitive case-by-case kind of thing. I don't think there's a fast rule to anything. But that's why I say, in the case of Ching Chong Song, it makes the ridiculousness of the words stand out because of the kind of band they are and the kind of music they make. If they were a KKK country band or a gangster rap group with an Asian fetish, would I feel different? I don't know... maybe. It would depend on the hairstyles. Ha.” And still later, “I've been thinking ever more about what if those words were used in other contexts, and the conclusion I came to was that when it comes to words, I don't care that much. I'm not so much offended by words as I am by actual racists. In the example of bands I used, I thought it wouldn't be offensive that a KKK country band was using the words Ching Chong, it would be offensive that a KKK country band was racist. Do you get what I mean? Words are just words, but what's offensive are racists - people who actually believe another race of people are lower than them.” What is our responsibility when it comes to words? Should we police others, or only when their words are motivated out of hatred or ignorance? Where’s the line between using words and believing in all the meaning that they can encompass? Am I a hypocrite for getting so upset over Sasha’s word preference while listening to music made by this band? A friend told me, when I asked her about Ching Chong Song, that white people never ever under any circumstances get to use any ethnic slurs. They just don’t, because they’re white, and that means power and privilege and all the accompanying accoutrements. Whiteness is hegemonic, there’s no way around that. Ching Chong Song knew the slur they were invoking, they knew that paper/rock/scissors is a game played in Germany with the same name, and they knew that they liked the way the name sounded. Is it defensible? I don't know. Listen to their music. I’ve been conducting a poll here in Simferopol. I ask everyone I can about the little mustard-yellow squatter’s houses that are strewn across the landscape outside of Simferopol, outside of Bakhchyserai, and other Crimean towns to see how they explain them. (The little houses represent plots that Tatars have claimed – and now other groups have glommed on to the plan – in an attempt to get adequate land on which to build houses in the future.) About three or four responses have referred to the property as being seized by “Tatar mafia,” and, in one case, “Ukrainian-Tatar mafia.” These never come as explanations from Tatars. I mentioned this yesterday at lunch with 4 women from the Crimean Tatar Literature department at the University. One of them said, “Yes, I’m the mafia. I staked a claim.” She didn’t laugh. I said, “But doesn’t mafia imply power and violence?” She said, “It depends on your perspective.” Everyone at the table seemed to smile knowingly. I probably looked confused, because explanations followed: the Tatars are a minority group whose position is widely misunderstood by a majority people who have no real reason to try and empathize. In the sense that they’ve tried to organize and have been willing to take some risks (albeit non-violent ones) in asserting themselves as repatriates, sure, they’re a mafia. Nobody got too touchy about the word itself, the label of “mafia.” The term, with it’s не красиви connotations, became a stand-in for Crimean Tatar solidarity at the lunch table. The word itself unbecame the word as it's defined in the dictionary. It unbecame itself in our conversation, as we tried to understand the perspective of other people's (inappropriate) use of the term. Maybe there's something to that: unbecoming. I present you with the tip of the iceberg. --- There seem to be lots of fireworks going on outside in my neighborhood right now. I wonder if it’s because the sun finally came out of hiding today.