Courtesy of kingkama:

Postsecret.  Sometimes it can go for months without anything that catches my attention, and sometimes it seems every time I look there’s something there threatening to rip my arms off and use them to beat me unconscious.

And while I’m at it…

For all my white friends who aren’t “accustomed” to dealing with me as a black person: do you know why something hip-hop or R&B comes on right after any hard-core classical music I listen to in iTunes?  Because I can see you becoming visibly uncomfortable when it happens.  That’s good for a cheap laugh.

Some of you may even remember how I used to sit in the music school building blasting Prince and Laurie Anderson on my ghetto blaster in the hallways between classes.  Good times…

Easing on down that same path, we are.

I really don’t think it merits the continued public argument, but anyway…

We started with this sometime last year:

And last week came this:

The Whoopi passage that always stands out in my mind is this:

Because really, it’s the intent, isn’t it. It’s never the word. Like the “N Word”. That’s what we’ve got to call it now. The “N Word”. And everyone says “Don’t say it again. We should put a moratorium on it, because it’s a bad word. It’s a word that raises all kinds of connotations to people.” And it’s mad! But see it’s not bad to me, because I don’t know any, and I’ve never been one. So when I hear somebody say it, I don’t turn around! Because I know they’re not talking to me.  [Emphasis added.]

But apparently other people don’t feel like that. Apparently other people feel like it’s a very bad word. But is it the word? Because just because you don’t say it, doesn’t mean you’re not thinking it, you see. And you can’t stop anybody from thinking it. So what is it that really upsets us? It’s not the word, it’s the intent of the word, all the things it’s supposed to mean. Like the word “stupid”. So to me, it’s kinda the same. Though I can say “stupid” endlessly, and nobody is shocked. But if I say “The N Word”, everybody gonna get mad.

And you know, white folks, I’m talking specifically now to y’all. Because the problem with white folks is you hear the word, and you say to black people, “Well you all say it, why can’t we say it?” Now here’s your first problem. You ask permission to say a word you already are not comfortable with. And then you’re surprised when somebody pops you in the eyeball. Come on. What did you think was going to happen? See, in the olden days, nobody asked for permission, they just said it. And when you ask permission, you want permission to say something to me that you don’t think is right. Why would I give that to you? And as you see, people get in a lot of trouble. People lose their minds, and go “rr rr rr rr rr.”

To look only at the latter incident without considering the former is how so many people miss the point, I believe.  So many people interpreted the incident last Thursday (which I did not see live because I’m generally in transit or otherwise occupied during most of The View, on the rare occasions that I deign to watch it) as Whoopi being just one more black person saying “We can say it and you can’t,” which isn’t the point at all; if I may re-reference, it’s like the word “stupid” in that it’s not the word itself, it’s the intent with which the word is spoken (“You can’t say ‘stupid’ with a smile on your face”).  I am fully adherent to the principle, made concrete by the judicial system with regard to the difference between murder and manslaughter, that intent is the most difficult thing in the world to prove.

The first time I heard the phrase I must have been eighteen or nineteen years old, so it was well before Chris Rock had taken it and trotted it out nationally in 1996 and the even earlier Ice Cube reference that Rock took it from, and, ironically if you will (in hindsight), it was a white guy who said it.

I found Skip attractive, and that may have been part of my motivation to give him the benefit of the doubt; besides, it seemed like a reasonable argument.  A few years later, Skip was, for whatever reason, willing to take a minor stand against one of the more obnoxious elitist queens in town in a straight-up in-your-face public dis, refusing to come to a “posh” after-hours party for all the pretty white boys in town as long as I wasn’t invited, which made it even more rational for me to have given Skip a pass on the whole argument.  As long as I was one of the good black people, I didn’t really have anything to complain about, right?  If someone was flinging that word around, I could be assured they weren’t talking about me.

The thing is, that argument of intent keeps creeping in to the train of thought.  The notion that just because someone isn’t saying the word doesn’t mean that the word isn’t somewhere in the room.  A level of tacit realization always exists that I and others like me might, as “good” black people, might simply be a conduit through which not-quite-fully-“enlightened” people might justify, nurture, and perpetuate racist notions.  That old the-exception-proves-the-rule chestnut.

I might be inclined to feel guilty about giving Skip a pass on the whole racial stratification thing were it not for the colorist or field vs. house disputes that have been going on among blacks since the plantation days.  Since I’m viewed with disdain by those black people who think of me as “assimilated,” I don’t always feel obliged to empathize when that word starts flying around again, as it inevitably does.

As for the poor, tearful Ms. Hasselbeck, as well-intentioned as she is in her desire to eliminate that word from The American Lexicon, surely she must be intelligent enough to realize that even if we get rid of the word itself, people will surely find other words to express the same intent, and that the specific intent can never be eliminated.

Even with all that said, I prefer to think that many people are smart enough to think beyond word to context and gauge their word choices accordingly.

I wonder what the pay scale for poststructuralist semanticists is like…

I cannot figure out where people get their kinks; I don’t think anyone can, but…

For the life of me, I can’t figure out why men doing green building/renovation on their own homes makes me relentlessly horny.

I’m not kidding.  I would blow Ed Begley, Jr. twelve times a day.  Men that I wouldn’t necessarily look at twice (particularly if they were driving Hummers or some such) suddenly become lust objects once any one of them says “recycled denim insulation” or “gray water reclamation.”

Watching Planet Green may count as an act of egregious perversion for me now.

I do feel, though, that the light bulb factory renovation in South Central Los Angeles smacks a little uncomfortably of gentrification.  Increasing the value of a distressed property by a half-million dollars — should the skinny, hairless guy decide to flip the property — does things to the values of the surrounding properties that make feel a little ooky.

But yeah, I still want to do the guy.  Doggy-style, backed up against his clay-finished non-off-gassing walls.

I know, it’s weird to dwell on such minutiæ…