Editorials

#YEAR13PROBLEMS

16 October 2017

By Lauren E. White

Let’s talk about language

I don’t mean foreign ones or any A Level subjects, I mean your language. The words you personally use. Yes, you as a person.

Think about it: what kinds of words do you use on a daily basis? Do you swear a lot? Do you talk people down a lot? Do you talk yourself down a lot?

More importantly, though, are you respectful to other people when you speak to them? This doesn’t mean calling your friends things you’d call your worst enemy from time to time as a joke. It means how far do you take your privilege?

Image result for white privilege

As a white person, I am well aware that I have privilege. After all, I am less likely to be arrested than a black person and I am less likely to be remanded in custody during a Crown Court case than a black person. I am also less likely to be watched closely in a shop because of prejudice against my skin colour (even though I am a young person) and I have around a zero percent chance of being called the N-word.

And that’s what I’m really wanting to talk about today: the N-word.

I’m not even going to spell it because you know exactly what I’m talking about, especially if you use it.

Now, to you, a white person who sings it in a song lyric or says it to a friend, means nothing. It’s “just something you say”, isn’t it? Well, it’s time you stopped saying it.

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The N-word goes back a long way. It goes back to a time when people of our colour – your colour too – would ship black people across the ocean to make money off of them against their will. And it wasn’t just shipping them across the ocean, it was whipping and beating them, it was raping and terrorising them too. It was lynching them and locking them up without trial and covering up their murders.

Now, I’m not saying you personally lynched black people in the 20th century. That would be stupid. I’m telling you that people who had the same skin colour as you did that and used the N-word the whole time while doing so. What I have just talked about above is what the N-word is associated with. And that’s why you shouldn’t use it.

If you use the N-word, you should remember this and you shouldn’t say it again. If you continue to use it, you’re a disgrace and, frankly, make me feel a little bit sick. If you use the N-word to your black friend and you’re white, you are most definitely deluding yourself. It is not okay to call your friend that word even if you “aren’t being racist”. The issue is, you are. And you are too blinded by your own white privilege to notice it.

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If your friend doesn’t tell you to stop calling them the N-word or using it, it doesn’t mean they’re fine with it. It means they aren’t even going to bother telling you, and that’s when you should be even more ashamed. Your own friend can’t even ask you to stop being racist.

So it’s time to make a choice: are you going to continue being racist or are you going to stop and recognise the reasons why? I hope you make the right choice and choose not to be part of the group of white people who think it’s okay for them to behave in such an embarrassing and disgusting way.

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