The power of words

I want to preface this post by stating the following things:

1. This contains some very strong language, some of which will offend some of you. If that's you, this post isn't for you. Please realize that if you read this post still get offended, that's all on you and there's nothing I can do for you.
2. This is my personal opinion, not the opinion of anyone I associate with.
3. If you disagree, that's cool. Be respectful in your disagreement, we might actually have an enlightening debate.
4. This is the internet. The men are men, the women are men, and the children are FBI agents. That's a joke. You're supposed to laugh.

Now that we got that out of the way, we can actually get down to the actual content I had in mind. Such is the way our life is, nowadays... The quick TL;DR is: Let's not let ourselves be consumed by hate, let's talk instead. We might actually get somewhere.

A big name Twitch streamer by the name of m0E_TV was recently banned from twitch for 30 days for his use of a slur on his stream. He casually threw the word "faggot" into his normal conversation, and the internet has been very, very quick to condemn him for it. One person on twitter told of how he was called a faggot while being beaten up. I think both of them handled that conversation poorly, but that's not what I want to write about here. I want to write about something else. Something...unpopular. But before I talk about it, I want to give backstory. Our learned experiences shape us, across all walks of life.

I was bullied in middle school. A lot. So much so, that I tried to end my own life in 7th grade. It was the last Wednesday in February, 1999. I genuinely believed that the world would be better off if I didn't exist. Not hard to come to that conclusion when you have an IQ of 130 at 6 years of age, but can't do anything about it because ADHD and autism. You can't convey the thoughts in your head, and when you try, nobody understands. So the public school system puts you in the Special Education program, slowing things down "so you can understand it." Once that label is associated with you, there's no sloughing it off. You're retarded, and everyone knows it.

Middle school was the worst, though. Hormones bring out the worst in people, and those with already low self esteem fall even lower. Pokemon was one of those few solaces back then, but that only made things worse. They called me "gay boy," made worse by the fact that I was the only friend for a kid who had two dads. In 1999. So of course they made the connection that I'm gay, too. Not the case, but the court of public opinion already decided that. They decided that I'm a faggot and that was that. And they were merciless. One of the paraprofessionals pulled me aside during one of my low points, and tried to teach me something important:

"Don't let them control you. Your reaction gives them the fuel they need to keep going at you."

Would you want to hear that? Hell no! I chewed him out, as anyone likely would. They needed to change! They were being mean! They were the ones at fault, not me!

And in a way, I was right.

But so was he. It took me a long time before I finally figured that out. And I discovered that on the strangest of places.

I spent time lurking on the various boards of 4chan in the late 2000's starting around 2009. And while I was there, I learned something very interesting about 4chan. They have an unusual way of gatekeeping their community. Anyone is welcome to post, but all identifiers are stripped away. In its place, everyone is black, gay, jewish, and male. But they used the slurs, the offensive terms. This kept out people who were too easily offended from showing up, getting mad, and then causing a flurry of shitposting that accomplished nothing.

They savored a delicious irony, though. In using slurs the way they did, the term faggot lost its sting. And that was when I realized that that para was right. I realized that I allowed myself to be held prisoner by my classmates. It wasn't flippant, he was far wiser than I at the time. When you slough off the sting of the words, then you can actually get down to doing something about the racism/sexism/religious hate.

And that's actually what they did. Everyone was (and is) a faggot. You had oldfags, newfags, tripfags, and the like. Anyone who starts a thread cannot stop sucking dick, and everyone was in on it. What was praticularly eye opening for me was an exchange with a "fagfag" who reported in on a thread. People asked him what it was like sucking dick all the time. His response?

"Pretty great, actually."

And people went with it. They accepted him as one of their own. Sure, there were still people who hated on him, but they were ignored. Nobody took the bait. Sure, not everybody subscribed to this, and plenty of people lied on the site. It was the most wretched hive of scum and villainy, but it was truly equal in every sense of the word.

If you've read all...895 words so far, good on you. If you're not frothing at the mouth, even better! You're probably wondering where I'm going with all this. Sit tight, I'm getting there!

Obviously, not everyone is ready or willing to entertain a conversation about racism, sexism, or otherwise. When I bring up the concept of erasing the sting of the words, the examples I list above are met with hostility. I am told that I'm no better than the racists that use them maliciously. I'm told that I am not allowed to discuss race because of the color of my skin. When I ask for their learned experiences, I am told that I'm wrong, and that I'm the problem.

Much like what I said earlier, we are held prisoners in our own mind. It's not unlike Plato's allegory of the cave.

The allegory of the cave is a piece of Greek philosophy central to virtually every philosophy curriculum. In it, Glaucon (Plato's Brother) and Socrates debate the idea of how we perceive the world around us. It used a cave, with people chained up inside it, as the setting. These people are held prisoner in the cave. A fire lights up "puppets" of various things, depicting the shadows on the wall of the cave. The prisoners see the shadows, and they know that these things are real to them. If one were to be released from the cave, they would find themselves in a world that they don't understand. Should they return, they would tell the other prisoners about the things they saw and experienced. The other prisoners would hear the tales from the freed prisoner, but not understand because they have no point of reference. What's more, they would lash out at the man that saw the surface, his ideas too foreign, too outlandish to be possibly true.

We're more or less in a similar boat. When challenged with an opinion that is not our own, our first reaction is that of anger. It goes both ways, and I'm just as guilty of this. I'll be the first to admit it! But perhaps, maybe, just maybe, if we share our life experiences with each other, maybe we can learn and grow from those around us. For me, I had to let hate speech become something that lost its sting. People deride me for it, because I haven't experienced their lives. That's correct. They haven't experienced mine. That's also correct. Perhaps if we share our lived experiences, we might get somewhere. We might also get a chance to actually get things done, once words no longer confine us.

And in the interest of practicing what I preach, I want to start a conversation. Let's talk. Please, share your learned experiences with me. If you disagree with me, explain why. Let's have a discussion, rather than dig battle trenches. We cannot expect to live in hatred forever, let's start mending things now.

Who's with me?

Final note: If you're wondering why I included the LGBT tag, it's because in my experience, the LGBT community has been the most likely to lash out at me for this. Maybe I'm a glutton for punishment, maybe I'm crazy, maybe I want to hear the learned experiences from the LGBT community. Best thing I can do at this point is to offer an olive branch and be willing to listen. Maybe we can make some progress that way.