By Rev. Dr. Horace F. Whittaker, Jr.

There was a saying in my childhood in the 1960s that was restated over and over again. The saying we heard is reported to have been first published nationally in The Christian Recorder, a publication of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, in March of 1862, an adage you undoubtedly have heard in some form or fashion. It said, "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never break me." I remember my elders saying 'hurt me' instead of 'break me,' but the sentiment was the same. The idea was words could not cause harm to people in the same way as sticks and stones. Words cannot do to the human body what lynching, a shotgun, a Glock .40 caliber pistol, or an AK-15 semi-automatic rifle does to human flesh. Words can't choke you or place a knee on your throat. The physical damage that comes from the robotic detonation of a bomb or a drone strike can be described in words. Still, verbal declarations alone can't destroy bodies or communities, like surface-to-air missiles or an improvised explosive device (I.E.D.) can do to soldiers in battle or civilians viewed as collateral damage. Words don't kill people who just happen to step on buried land mines or cause cancer from burn pits and agent orange or the resulting congenital disabilities experienced by Japanese, Vietnamese, Korean, Iraqi, British, and American children. No, words can't do to flesh and bone what was done to our sisters and brothers in Parkland, Buffalo, Uvalde, Atlanta, Virginia, and Colorado Springs. Words do not tear away limbs or suffocate or require surgery and sutures to try and put womankind's children back together again.

But words can and do break people. Words can and do cause mental and emotional harm. Words can and do inflict psychic pain so intense that they can push people to break from life and reality or kill themselves. Judicial pronouncements sentenced purple heart recipient Manny Babbitt to death by lethal injection, children and women to life imprisonment, and inhumane solitary confinement through the mass incarceration of black people, the modern version of lynching. Furthermore, name-calling that punches down on black people and other sisters and brothers from different mothers tries to denigrate and degrade our humanity. Name-calling, repeated for decades and over centuries, becomes embedded within cultures to such an extent that the phrases, ideas, and their meaning are transformed into common sense knowledge that most people believe, without question, is true. Name-calling creates dehumanizing characterizations of other members of the human family, simply by what Joyce E. King calls dysconsciousness or more commonly understood as parroting culturally embedded statements such as 'those people are not like us,' 'they aren't human' or 'they are animals, beasts and uncivilized.' In other words, name-calling is used to falsely brand inferiority onto peoples' bodies, places, and ethnicity by supremacist segregationists. 

Now all branding is not false. Truth and falsehood are real. There is such a thing as foolishness and hard work, and one can truthfully be called a fool or a hard worker. We all know people who are stingy, kind, hateful, and loving. Utilized with care—these labels and names apply to people we know. But I am saying that the ideology of superior and inferior people is a lie because the idea has been proven false and untrue. Yet, the lie and discrimination based on skin color persist, so much that researchers have developed a name for labeling some human beings superior and some inferior. It's called "othering." 

OTHERING

In the Othering & Belonging Institute inaugural journal entitled "The Problem of Othering: Towards Inclusiveness and Belonging" written by john a powell and Stephen Menendian (2016), othering is defined "as a set of dynamics, processes, and structures that engender marginality and persistent inequality across any of the full range of human differences based on group identities." They go on to say, "[d]imensions of othering include but are not limited to, religion, sex, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status (class), disability, sexual orientation, and skin tone" (p. 2). Othering, according to Briscoe (2004), "is a consequence of a century of mostly well-off white men, as the writers of social science, defining their own and others' identities which propagates a supremacist universalism for the writer's group and segregates all others" (p. 5). In other words, in the past, wealthy white Euro-Americans created narratives about human development that said their way of life was better than the lives led by people of color and that white Euro-American culture was the only normal way for all humans to live. On the other hand, every culture engages in the process of defining itself without supremacist ideas. Lawrence (1995) for example, posited the capacity to compose text, to center oneself as topical, and to author your own story is foundational to humanness and liberty (p. 349). 

For centuries, Africans, AFRI-Americans, and our black and indigenous sisters and brothers have told our stories in various ways, including orality, medu netjer (hieroglyphics), texts, and across every media apparatus known to womankind; still, the narrative of black inferiority and white superiority, which has been scientifically proven to be false, persists globally. For example, Duello et al. (2021), citing previous research, assert "[i]n 2003, Phase 1 of the Human Genome Project (HGP) demonstrated that humans populating the earth today are on average 99.9% identical at the DNA level, there is no genetic basis for race, and there is more genetic variation within a race than between them" (p. 233). In other words, science tells us humans are one people and there is more difference among whites themselves than the difference between blacks and whites.

 Yet, humaneness and liberty continue to be systematically stolen from blacks through persisting centuries-old acts of name-calling, othering, labeling, or branding, if you like, initiated by European, Arab, and Euro-American males, who organized the content, books, and access to the publications that reproduced supremacist ideologies that today are so thoroughly culturally embedded as to be considered common social knowledge within white European, Arab, and Euro American societies specifically, and by most global ethnicities exposed to this lie, generally.