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[ijustwantkungfu]

I haven't posted in a really long time, so I suppose it's time. Hello! How are you? I'm kind of having a blast around here. My classes are pretty awesome, and my print classes are going well (except fot the computer. I hate working on the computer. Digital print would do really well to go eat a dick. I'm serious about this.)

Comments

[ijustwantkungfu]

figuring out why we wanted to to it is actually totally step one. Sondra (who is black, so it's not just a bunch of white kids making this up) spent a lot of time just thinking about the idea of the word. How loaded it is, but trying to figure out why, and how a person might go about disarming it. She got us together, we did the experiment, and what happened with us is that we started out being really tense and aprehensive, and there were two kids who REALLY didn't want to, but just repeating the word for 10 minutes made us more comfortable with it, enough that we could actually face it, and we had a subsequent 5 hour discussion that was the most candid I've ever had about race, and how it exists in the world today. One thing we learned from it is that everybody was getting something really different and personal out of the experiment, but we were all thinking about things that our liberal sensibilities usually tell us to ignore. Really the goal right now is to bring that same level of candid examination to more people than just us, and if people are willing to not write us off for using that particular word, we may be able to achieve it.

[flavia_sneech]

My question then is: Does one have to be comfortable with violent terminology to have a candid/honest discussion about a weighty topic?

Because I feel like often people use that as an excuse for not discussing race -- "we can't do it because we don't really get it." Obviously, that's not what you're doing, per se, but the notion that it's requisite for true conversation gives a lot of power to a word that already has been given too much.

I guess I just don't see the first part of the exercise as required to achieve the second. I.E. you don't have to sit and have someone call you nigger in order to feel like you really trust them. That trust (the requirement for having open, honest dialogue) can occur through other avenues.