From: GRIIVEA@YaleVM.YCC.Yale.Edu
Subject: Re: " DIs and "Nigger" Dat
Organization: Yale University
Date: Tue, 10 Nov 92 15:16:09 EST

You have not intruded Nelson.  Your query goes right to the heart of
the matter.
 
    The internalization of the meanings of cultural symbols is a
complex, and poorly understood, psycho-social process.  We do know,
however, that it involves interactions - between the individual
personality and "others" - embedded in pre-existing socio-cultural
structures/relations/processes/phenonmena.  But that does not mean that
individuals are passive consumers of culture or cultural symbols.
It must be remembered that the egg may come before the chicken,
but the chicken breaks out of the egg.
 
    That is to say that one of the unique characteristics of
homo-socialis is her ability to act as a quasi-autonomous, boundedly
rational, symbolic social actor.  Acting as cultural entrepreneurs
with limited information, individuals use the resources at their
disposal, including their social and cultural capital, in order to
manipulate "that web of significance" in which we are all suspended,
so that they can improve their life chances.
 
    We are all knowledgable agents.  That is to say that
we are all social actors who know a great deal about
the conditions and consequences of our actions.  We know that cultural
symbols: 1) have multiple meanings and connotations, 2) that these
meanings and connotations change over time, 3) that cultural symbols
have different meanings in different places, 4) that therefore their
content is not fixed and immutable, but fluid and flexible, and 5)
that individuals can, should, and do manipulate both cultural symbols
and their cultural contents in order to improve their life chances.
 
    All of this is my long winded way of saying that words are tools.
That words are arbitrary symbolic representations of ideas.  And that we
must never allow words to become reified because we only control our
(i)deas to the extent that we can autonomously manipulate language.
 
    A people who losses control of its language (something particularly
anathama to an oral/aural culture like African American southern
peasant culture.) in this (post)industrial age, will participate,
however unwillingly, in their own hegemonic domination.
Lacking a critical vernacular vocabulary, they will uncritically
internalize the dominant hegemonic ideology.  An ideology that is
manufactured by the professional hirelings of the elite who controls
and manipulates the means of symbol production and reproduction
in this society.  An elite in pursuit of its own interest.
 
    We may forget the word "nigger," but those "others" won't.  "Nigger"
will still be out there in the socio-cultural ether where it can/will
be used to demonize and demoralize.  So I say use/deconstruct/manipulate
the word "nigger."  Point out how "nigger(s)" is/are historically
situated and culturally embedded.  Let those "others" internalize
our "nigger."  That's one way to use language in order to improve our
collective life chances.   Just shape the word.
 
 
 
                                                 Iverson
 
Newsgroups: soc.culture.african.american,alt.politics.clinton