Repurposed: Why Words Matter
A few weeks ago I went to an academic debate over whether or not Black Lives Matter hurts race relations in the United States. In an unusually packed house, a little over a hundred people sat quietly, ready to listen to a set of speakers argue for and against the resolution in the typical civilized, albeit boring, fashion. Two minutes into the first presenter’s speech and the chanting began, the speaker’s now quivering voice softening as the cries grew louder and waves of heavy feet pounded up the stairs and down the hallway to the room in which we all sat, incredulous that our boring meeting of academia had become so exciting. The doors flew open and what seemed to be an innumerable amount of Black Lives Matter protesters stormed in with signs, their voices decrying their namesake mantra, filling every all the empty space the room had left and sucking all the air out in one grand gesture.
The debate carried on in sickly fashion, the speeches all interrupted after practically every sentence and many speakers too unnerved to even reach the podium. No opinions were free from commentary: it wasn’t that the protesters were on a particular side of the debate, they were protesting the entire thing. They just couldn’t believe that we would have the audacity to even question whether or not black lives matter.
We snap at each bit of information we receive like hungry hungry hippos reaching for a tiny plastic ball, unwrapping and interpreting each piece on its own, as if the balls were separate and not all a part of the same game.
This, however, confused me, because that’s not why I was there at all. I knew that black lives matter, and was and continue to be a strong proponent of criminal justice reform, the fight against police brutality and particularly the disproportionate police brutality American people of color face every day. But I wasn’t there to voice these opinions, because I assumed we were all of the same mind. Instead of debating whether or not black lives matter, I was there simply to debate questions surrounding Black Lives Matter. Have I lost you yet?
I was there for the same reason everyone else was, or so I thought: to debate the efficacy and pragmatism of the movement’s methods and decisions made in order to try to achieve their goal, not their goal itself. Clearly that fact had either been lost on everyone else, or it had only been lost on me, but certainly somewhere in between there was a disconnect. As it turned out, that disconnect lay muddled between our two understandings of poorly chosen rhetoric.
Detach, if you would, Black Lives Matter the movement from the phrase from which the movement draws its name, “black lives matter,” an adage that I hope we can all say we ascribe to. Instead, focus on the choice by those that began the movement to name it as they did.
I believed that the problem with Black Lives Matter is that they did not name their movement with a name, they named it with a statement- a statement which, when rejected, proved incendiary. While it may have seemed like a good idea to make such a powerful statement into the name they would use for their now national movement, it creates the precarious conditions of possibility which would allow for someone to unknowingly say something they do not actually mean.
It’s not ridiculous for an overworked and grumpy person on their way home from work to have the opinion “I don’t like Black Lives Matter” when their route home is blocked by protesters along the highway. Phrases like “I don’t support Black Lives Matter” or “I don’t believe in Black Lives Matter” can find themselves coming out of the mouths of relatively or even totally accepting people, simply due to unfortunate encounters with a group claiming to be a part of the movement.
This is not to say that everyone who expresses things like these is still an active participant in the fight against injustice. Many people who would say things such as these probably do not. But, for those who genuinely believe in the movement’s goals but find fault with the way the movement conducts itself, by making it sound as if a rejection of the movement’s practices is a rejection of its goals, it’s possible that the decision to name the organization of the movement as such has caused unnecessary and potentially irreparable damage to the fertility of its ultimate goal.
The point of this drawn-out, nit-picky dissection of one simple name is simply to show that all rhetoric is chosen, chosen for a reason, and not without repercussions. When choosing what we say, we have to take into account that funny quality that words have about them: they can mean many different things to many different people.
Words also have another funny quality: when you repeat them over and over, they begin to sound like nothing at all. The same words that have always sounded right to you quickly devolve into meaningless syllables and absurd three-letter sound bites, making you wonder why their combined absurdity once firmly stood, in your mind and in the minds of all those around you, for a certain type of pasta or an expensive garden manicuring device.
The funniest part about this funny quality of words is that when we speak, we are purposefully ignoring it. Of course some random collection of syllables sounds like gibberish when repeated over and over - that’s exactly what words are, gibberish. Gibberish that we have collectively decided means something. Words are, quite simply, normalized gibberish.
In the past few years, we’ve normalized many different kind of gibberish. Not ones that are fundamentally unintelligible, as you’d expect with what we would normally consider gibberish, but ones that makes no practical sense, even as they’re making literal sense.
A stereotype that has arisen in the past few years is that of the crazy Facebook relative. Everybody seems to have an uncle who posts pictures of himself with multiple assault rifles in front of a proudly hung confederate flag in order to show his solidarity with those who still believe in “Southern Pride,” or a cousin who just does not seem capable of restraining herself from sharing anything and everything published online by PETA. At one point in time, their outrage about whatever issue they were posting about seemed justified and genuine, but now, three years after they made their Facebook account, it appears as though they just react the same way to every issue that catches their eye: with anger, disbelief, and outrage.
It now seems as if the key facet of this stereotype, outrage in the face of less-than-legitimate issues, has spread beyond the grandmother who only shares her feelings in caps lock and the mother who hasn’t yet learned that you don’t have to sign comments like letters, to even those of us who believe ourselves particularly adept at navigating the internet in all of its glory and stupidity. Thanks to our keyboard-crazy relatives, internet media has learned that outrage sells. And since outrage sells, outrage is what we get.
And that’s okay when it’s genuine. It is an issue that sea turtles are dying in droves because their stomachs fill up with the plastic we pump out into the ocean. It is a problem that we live in a country that cannot come to terms with the systematic racism built into its foundation. The problem is that because we have gotten so used to expressing the same emotion for two very different problems, we have lost our all depth perception in the way we experience them. While I care about the health and wellbeing of sea turtles, I care more about the health and wellbeing of minority groups in the United States, and I would like to assume that the same can be said for a large majority of Americans. But if we’ve run out of different ways to express our differing levels of outrage at these two very different injustices, how are we to not only distinguish between the two, but also decide which one takes precedent over the other? Which one we’re supposed to act on more seriously?
I don’t suppose to tell you that the solution to this problem is to de-escalate any sort of concern, as that would be the lazy way to fix the problem overhyped outrage. Instead, the solution is simply an emphasis on critical thinking, understanding, and genuine interpretation, at both the level of the person expressing their opinions, and those interpreting them.
What both of these examples aim to prove is that no style of rhetoric is immune to misinterpretation; no language is without weakness, no words without ambiguity, no interpretations without gaps. In response to this, we’ve pushed ourselves to two extremes: we dismiss any and all speech as flawed, bendable and able to mean whatever we would like it to mean, thus rendering it meaningless, or we take every piece of rhetoric we encounter literally, giving each word, phrase, and utterance each the same time of day and ignoring any linguistic nuance or holistic meaning in any chosen rhetoric. Neither of these is preferable, as both fail to compensate for the interpretations that the other gets right, but at least the former doesn’t fall prey to the sort of piecewise communication we have normalized in the way we interpret rhetoric today.
This is the biggest issue we face in a world proliferated by speech cut into sound bites and packaged in small chunks that prove ubiquitously digestible by minds craving constant stimulation is that, like words on a teleprompter, we interpret them the moment they appear. We snap at each bit of information we receive like hungry hungry hippos reaching for a tiny plastic ball, unwrapping and interpreting each piece on its own, as if the balls were separate and not all a part of the same game. Too often do arguments dissolve into bickering matches simply because they take the shape of an upside-down pyramid: beginning with the holistic interpretation of the argument, and subsequently broken down into smaller and smaller arguments that alone have little to nothing to do with the original argument in its totality.
This style of arguing appears to render each original conjecture as false, due to the simple fact that the statements made at the smallest level become arguments indicative of the original, and therefore their validity, or lack thereof, seems to reflect the larger argument itself. It’s like trying to argue that being transgender could technically be defined as having a mental illness, but instead ending up haggling over the value judgement that having the phrase “mental illness” associated with something makes about it. The latter is completely separate from the first, but since we may not agree on it and you deem it important to your argument, you and I will disregard each other’s main points. Combine this style of flawed debate with inconsistencies in rhetoric and rhetorical analysis, and we end up with the polarizing gridlock in mutual understanding that I found in the room in which we held our debate, and that we all find to be rampant in the United States today.
No style of rhetoric is immune to misinterpretation; no language is without weakness, no words without ambiguity, no interpretations without gaps.
Truth be told, I understood the argument of those who showed up to protest the debate that I thought I was so academically sophisticated in attending; I just disagreed with the way that they made it. Therefore, I rejected any and all facets of what they were saying. Because they engaged with those like me, those of us who wished to continue the debate in the way it had been intended, using the hungry hungry hippo strategy of willful misunderstanding or, at the very least, willful rejection of any attempt at understanding the argument for the debate they so desperately wished to shut down, I did the same.
I wish I could say this style of engagement were rare or even unique to the day and age in which we find ourselves - perhaps due to societal growth in the inability to be patient or think critically - but I can’t, because I’m not sure that it is. Like many things we think have gotten worse with time - violence, racism, poverty, etc. - it’s actually only our familiarity with and knowledge of this issue that has grown. Thanks to the connectivity afforded us by social media and other forms of instantaneous communication, it is possible that we have lost a patience we once had, but based on the sources we have to consider the past, namely books, movies, and the very people that raised us, it is unlikely.
Instead, perhaps we are simply more aware of our innate inability to stop, wait, listen, and fully consider the thoughts, ideas, and arguments of others. And with that awareness, we can work with the shortcomings of our chosen rhetoric and conduct ourselves in a manner than elicits a coherent and rational significance out of the normalized gibberish we choose to involve ourselves in. Perhaps if we really tried to understand the intentions behind the arguments of those with whom we find ourselves at odds, we would therefore communicate in a way that is not only more efficient, but also more therapeutic, more tolerant, and more accepting, even at the most basic level of conversation.