The Language of Liars

And screaming at the radio is not the habit of a healthy mind...

For a short time, I taught High School English, and my guiding principle, the simple truth that defined the purpose of each class, I posted above the blackboard: “Words are the currency of thought”. Day one, lesson one. The purpose of language is communication, and in order to communicate, there must be a set of definitions and rules of the road everyone adheres to. If we make up our own words and our own syntax, or decide arbitrarily that when we use a particular word it will mean this, and not that, communicating is no longer the point. If we’re just saying what we mean, “keeping it real”, without any concern for being understood, we are just making noises and can’t expect anyone to care about what is being said. You can call bicycles “zucchini” if you choose to. Just don’t expect to be understood.

This came back to me today when I was driving back from Cambridge and flipping through the radio stations as I left the metropolitan area. In the 80s, 90s, and into the 20s I listened mostly to NPR. There was a decided leftist lean even in those days, but we spoke the same language and they often had programming about things I found interesting. Jazz, for example, and literature. So I punched in the numbers for 90.9, WBUR, a public broadcasting station I’d listened to for years. A man was speaking and he was listing facts about health.

“blah blah percentage of type II diabetes, blah blah percentage of heart disease, blah blah percentage of COPD…” It was meaningless out of context, but I left it on to see where he was going and he eventually got there. After listing percentages of a population suffering from particular ailments he made his stand. “These are just some of the health struggles suffered by people who look like me.”

“WTF?” I shouted at the radio as I quickly changed the station. “Do the members of this population look exactly like you? Can you tell one another apart? Do you all need to wear f’ing name tags to avoid confusion?”

I’ve met some people who look sorta-kinda like me and at various points in my life I’ve been compared to John Astin (Gomez Adams) and Donald Sutherland, though, strangely, no one has ever accused me of looking like Brad Pitt. I can’t think of any group, anywhere, I would describe as “looking like me.”

Of course, the speaker considers himself “black”, and by “people who look like me” he meant other black people, but even that is just nonsense that we are expected to swallow without sparing a critical thought. I imagined myself interviewing this individual and pulling out a huge color chart with pure white on one end and pure black on the other. Between the two would be the entire spread of possible complexions with pinks and browns and very, very dark. “Excuse me,” I imagined myself saying. “Of course there is no one who is pure white or pure black, so would you point out on this chart the range of the shades you believe look like you? Where it begins and where it ends?”

It’s a silly exercise, and we, as a society, have already given it way too much time. I let the scenario play out in my head and it ended where it always does. Much the way Justice Potter Stewart described hard-core pornography, the speaker would tell me, when asked to define “black”: “I know it when I see it.” There is no other possibility. There are millions of people who identify as Indian, or Arab, or Chinese, or Aborigine who are darker than many who identify as black. There are dark skinned people with blue eyes, or green. There is more genetic variation within any group we call a “race” than there is between these groups. When pressed, the terms used change to “people of color”, which is just as meaningless as white or black. Tall, short, heavy and skinny, fast and slow, smart and less than smart are all traits shared by humanity. No one can point to any individual and tell anything about them by the way they look. Period. This, as so many are want to say, is settled science.

So my stock answer when anyone claims a racial mantle, be it black or white, Hispanic or Asian. Really? Define “black” for me and I’ll consider the point. Define “white”. Define “Asian” and “Hispanic” in terms we can agree upon and that are useful. The groups are arbitrary and fluid, because they are useful terms for despots when undefined. Hell, what does “Hispanic” even have to do with race? Nothing at all. The term means, literally, “of or relating to the people, speech, or culture of Spain”. During the days of empire building and conquest, Spain cut a wide swathe, and the places where they held sway have a connection to Spain to this day. But so what? So did the French and the Portuguese and the English. English is spoken in Australia and French is spoken in Guiana and you can find haute-cuisine in Vietnam to this day. Today, one can be Hispanic and be any shade or size. It’s a useless term than can be equally applied to a Miskito Indian from Nicaragua or a banker in Madrid.

Race does not exist. It is a fiction, a construct, that defies definition. Ethnicity exists, and heritage and tradition, but not race. “Chinese” is real, but “Asian” is anyone from anywhere as distant as Yemen to an Inuit in Northern Russia. Were races real, we’d have working definitions to evenly apply. No wiggle would be required and none would be granted.

And I refuse to debate flimsy language. If there are no terms that can be defined, we are just making noises at one another. How can one claim that black lives matter without defining “black”? Is someone, somewhere, claiming that non-black lives matter more? Or that this undefined group, black, have lives that don’t matter? If there is someone making that argument, I haven’t heard it.

These are impolite and impolitic questions to ask, and because we are a polite society we usually don’t ask them, but we should, because this lie has real teeth and does actual damage and is defended like the crown jewels.

Vague language is the refuge of weasels. We all know this, instinctively, because we’ve grown up watching advertising. Nine out of ten dentist prefer your toothpaste? How many dentists did you ask? Red Bull will give me wings? Better wings than coffee or tea? Organic? Natural? As opposed to what? Inorganic and unnatural? 36 miles per gallon? On a test track, under perfect conditions, and downhill?

When someone refuses to define the terms they using, or changes the definition moment to moment to suit the situation, I tune them out. That is the place where I stop listening. These are made up terms that mean anything someone wants them to mean at the moment, which is the same as meaning nothing at all.

So, BLM, critical race theorists, politicians and hustlers, tell me now. What differentiate a person as “black” from a person as “white”? Where is the line?

What does someone who “looks like you” look like, exactly?

I less-than-anxiously await the answer that will never arrive.