Culture, Language, and Priorities

A ridiculous amount of Black men and Women, young men and women are held behind bars in American jails and prisons. If this was happening in the Nineteenth and early twentieth century to European Jewry the cries of Pogroms! Would rent the silence of apathy. But that's not the issue. In the July 2007 edition of Essence Magazine, Susan Taylor, The Editorial Director, as her contribution to move the purported Dialogue on usage of deemed offensive language forward in the wake of Don Imus, presented "apology" as a platform for action.

Now what is wrong with this Sisyphean indulgence?

First of all words of respect and atonement will not mean squat in the material condition of injustice and the seeming impotence to take meaningful action in arresting a slide which has the start of it's slope in the 1400's.

The cultural petri dish which produces attitudes about male and female for male and female has nothing to do with the variegated modes of it's expression. The Black American experience has an intractable nihilistic vein that is symptomatic of not specific injustice but historic injustice. So how practical is it for a well-fed member of Black intelligentsia to decree that the journey begins with "Apology."

Again, I close with: A Ridiculous amount of Black men and women, young men and women are held behind bars in American jails and prisons. If this was happening in the nineteenth and early twentieth century to European Jewry the cries of Pogrom! would rent the silence of apathy. But that's not the issue?

By Apropos