Crying Out in the Wilderness

Editor's Warning: Okay, I'm jumping into this one with both feet. I apologize in advance for any offense to anyone that this may cause. It touches on race, hate and history. It's about remembrance and its redeeming value to humanity. The main topic is a word that I personally abhor because it's ugly and raises images of sneering pale faces. I write about this word not as a apologist or defender of it, but rather as a term that has historical value and should not be screened from the historical context it arose out of. Enough said.

I admit it. I watch those forensic crime dramas on television. It is true that most of the time I can't really tell one from another but if it's got a dead body, I'll watch it. In this blog, I'm speaking about one of these shows called Cold Case. It's different in that it is about solving crimes that happened in the past and remain unsolved. There are two primary reasons I like the show. One is that the woman who stars in it (I don't recall her name) is hot in an almost-looks-like-an-albino-but-is-really-just-intensely-pale kinda way. Two is the way the show creates historical context through the use of flashbacks as it goes. The episodes are generally spot on. Okay. I said all that so that I can say, and I'm not ABSOLUTELY POSITIVE about this, that the last episode I saw was problematic in that it was about a black family moving to a white, rural town where a crisis arose over a black girl and white girl being friends in a relationship termed derisively by the white folks as "critter love." Now, the problem I have is that the era of the episode was the 1970's and I PRESUME that the use of the word "critter" was a politically correct replacement of another word that begins with an "N."

Yep, I'm talking about that word. Here, I'll even be brave and write it though it really makes me cringe. The word is nigger. (CRINGE) God I hate that word. My point here is that "nigger" was removed from the episode in favor of "critter" even though the former was much more likely to be used. That's a problem to me and it extends beyond this show into society generally.

My argument is that we should not take words like "nigger" and erase them from historical portrayal or, even worse, striking them from the historical record. Now, I understand the controversy surrounding these words and I agree that we shouldn't tolerate let alone encourage their use in contemporary locution. Does that mean they will vanish? No, especially considering their use by the very populations that white society labeled them with. That's beyond my scope here.

My message is that we can't erase bigotry and hate from the historical record. It's an ugly truth, but up until around the 1960's, it was accepted to use the nigger word openly, especially in the South. If we as Americans can't look in the mirror of historical analysis and accept the ugly scars we see, we are in great danger of recreating the events that caused the wounds to begin with. Humanity cannot afford to compartmentalize it's dark nature. We risk edifying ourselves unrealistically and deluding ourselves into believing that bigotry, hate and intolerance happened "back then." It's now. It always has been and always will be. The ugly and dirty MUST remain in portrayal to stay grounded in what we are capable of doing to each other. It's a large part of what can deter the arising of intolerance in society. These horrible words must remain in historical context so that we as a society can choose what we DO NOT want to be.