6 hours agotheblackmotherwound
Respectfully, I disagree. 🙏🏾This idea of 'words just being sounds we've attached meaning to' borrows Saussure’s point that the sign is arbitrary but leaves out his other point: once a community fixes that word’s meaning, no individual can unfix it, even through tone. Arbitrary doesn't mean empty. A word is a sound carrying an archive. Unlike a sign, Saussure admitted a symbol is not arbitrary. In an anti-Black order, this word stopped being a sign long ago. It is a symbol, bound by history to the violence it names. Our ancestors knew this. In the Memphite Theology on the Shabaka Stone, Ptah creates the world through the heart and the tongue. Kemetic burials have been found with gold tongue amulets so the dead could speak before the divine. Dogon based Afrocentric rhetoric names this power Nommo, the generative force of the word. Proverbs 18:21 places life and death in the power of the tongue. J.L. Austin’s speech act theory says that words do things, not only describe things. Toni Morrison said in her Nobel lecture that oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence. In the beginning was the word, right? I've tried to withdraw from the N-word since 2010. My longest stretch was 73 days, outside the US, and it ended with a song. I'm currently at 48 hours. If it is only a sound, why is it the one sound an FBA woman cannot escape inside the anti-Black order? Try it: abstain from hearing it for 30 days. Your ears will show you what the word is, and remind you of what it does. The ear is shaped like a child in the womb for a reason. What we hear, we carry.🖤
a day agokamaunosakhere
I love when I leave a stitched video with a certain immediate opinion (agree or disagree, like or dislike) and then you come in and add depth and nuance that makes everything make a bit more sense
a day agomeabso
Do you have any thoughts on Hiram L. Smith’s What’s up my Nigga”? I thought of you when I heard about it.
a day ago_faithwalker215
I swear on everything… the N-word an the fact that it’s clung to as a beacon of blackness is wild. Nobody else in the world fights harder to depend, use, or lend out a derogatory term. Like gatekeep something of value. Just use bro, homie, or whatever insult you want. But it pisses me and my ancestors office real bad
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