Yesterday, I visited two of the castles that are infamous for the slave trade from West Africa to the Americas. They are the Elmina Castle and the Cape Coast Castle on the southern coast of Ghana.
Walking through the structures is a difficult task. Not because of the roughly hewn stone and brick flooring or the extremely low doorway entrances. Not because of the bats that hang around in one of the rooms in Elimina. Not because most of the place is dark, musty and dolorous -- except the Governor's living quarters which are expansive, airy and ventilated in both castles. The difficulty is posed by imagining the horrors that were perpetrated in this very place by man upon fellow man.
Elmira castle provided slaves for the Portuguese colonials for use in Brazil; Cape Coast did the same for the British colonials in North America. Learning about the grave injustices that were done to Africans by Europeans and Americans is a difficult task. As if being bought and sold weren't enough, the slaves were chained to each other and to cannonballs, handcuffed, raped, beaten, tortured, stuffed into impossibly small quarters, forced to live for days and weeks in their own excrement that often rose to knee-height, and killed by slow starvation and thirst if they dared to try and flee.
Learning about all this made me wonder to which continents the label "dark" more aptly applies. If the absence of the light of knowledge, empathy and the milk of human kindness are any part of what "darkness" implies; it is not Africa that was the Dark Continent. It is us, Americans and our brethren in Europe who should accept our history and meekly accede that it is our continents that were truly dark and unlit.
Showing posts with label racism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label racism. Show all posts
Sunday, August 19, 2012
Monday, March 5, 2012
Anachronistic Derogation
English is my second language. As I learn new words and phrases, I simultaneously try to understand their history and etymological evolution as well. I am always happy to learn new meanings of familiar terms.
The other day, while facilitating a workshop, I used the metaphor "to call a spade a spade" in the context of a software practice. The subject under discussion was technical and my use of the phrase was in no way directed towards any human being or groups of human beings: I was addressing an inanimate technological practice. I don't think the phrase distracted me (or my audience) from the point I was trying to make, because the discussion continued on without being derailed.
In the ensuing break, my co-facilitator told me that the phrase had its origins in a racial slur against African Americans. I was taken aback since I had no idea that was the case. I thanked him for bringing this sorry history to my knowledge and privately resolved to not use the phrase in future.
However, something didn't sit well with me: I remembered reading the phrase in old texts, texts of English (as opposed to American) origin. I had some vague recollections from grade school about the phrase being a metaphorical translation from ancient languages. I know reading Wikipedia doesn't constitute research, however it's entry [1] agreed with my recollections: the phrase acquired negative connotations much later than it was coined. It had been used for generations without any racial overtones, until an unfortunate homonymic alliance with a racial epithet made it unpalatable.
I have run across other phrases that have been assigned a racial etymology retroactively: "chink in one's armor" comes to mind. As I understand, there was an incident recently where a journalist was fired because of his injudicious use of that phrase [2] in an online article.
As someone who has witnessed racist epithets first-hand (both applied to myself and to others within my earshot), I have an above-adequate aversion to such phrases. I am very happy when people object to the use of inherently and irrevocably derogatory words and phrases, even when the speaker might have done so in ignorance. I am equally happy when terms that are defamatory in their origin -- like "Paki", which applies to me -- is reclaimed by those towards whom it was directed as a form of insouciant and irrepressible pride.
However, I am troubled when a term that had no racial or derogatory overtones in its genesis, a term that has been used for decades or even centuries in a neutral way, suddenly acquires an anachronistic "history" of being a racially motivated term. It is history-rewriting of a rather egregious form. It is one thing for a word to evolve and acquire new meanings -- a living language should always exhibit this trait as a testament to the inquisitiveness and tolerance of its adherents -- however the reattribution of a word's or phrase's origins is a foul practice, on par with cheating and swindling.
I'll probably shy away from using the phrase my colleague asked me to avoid. However, I have enough spunk to use it one last time: rewriting a word's etymological history is just plain lying; to call it anything else is to avoid calling a spade a spade.
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