Loud Mouth Brown Girl

I used to call my friends bitch all the time. And then one day a boy called me a bitch and it didn’t feel so good coming from him.

So let’s break it down.

Bitch is a word used by women to connect each other to their inner power. When we call each other bitch – often in jest – it’s a compliment. “I see you bitch,” translates to “I see you you protective, powerhouse of a woman who will do anything to protect her children.”

When it comes from a man however it doesn’t have the same connotation. And that’s why I want to dig deeper into why language matters.

Black folk – in particular – are speaking a language all over social media, that white people are not privy to. They hear the words sure, and they see them too, but they have no idea what they mean, so they weaponize these words to hurt us, not understanding that they are just showing their true colors.

The Word Woke, for instance, was never meant to cause harm. It was designed, and purposely, to remind folks of color, not to get too comfortable around the same white people – or the descendants of those same white people – who tried for four hundred years to kill us.

They experimented on us, they murdered us, and quickly and slowly white folks have destroyed the lives of people of color, over generations. I’m not saying that every white person on the planet has a responsibility to look at their familial roots and question where they come from, but yes yes I fucking am.

Black folk – in particular – are the only race of people on the planet, who can’t track precisely where their people came from, without extensive study and research. That’s because so many of our ancestors were separated sometimes at birth, and other times years after being born.

Now we’re here, still learning that there are lots of white people – in particular, white people alone – who want to destroy everything that all of our ancestors built together. The good and the bad.

And that’s a really scary place to be. So when we’re thinking about language, mental health, and the way that people talk, we have to remember and really focus on the fact that what people say, how they say it, and what they mean are three entirely different animals.

Again words matter but so do tone, inflection, and historical resonance. When our ancestors said ‘stay woke’ they meant to stay safe, protect ourselves, remember the harm they did, and not sleep on the fact that they murdered us in the streets for being hungry and thirsty.

So yes we proudly continue to say Stay Woke Sis, to every girl of color, to every woman, to every man and child, that needs to be quietly reminded they aren’t alone.

We have a long way to go before Black people – all Black people – are free and safe. We love to talk about who has it better or easier, and we base our theories on the color of someone’s skin, but the truth is that all of us, every human on the planet, are dealing with a different kind of shit.

I have friends that I’ve just met who have had nothing but exhaustion since we met. Everything in their lives is filled with fluctuation right now, and it’s not just that they’re living in poverty, or that they are white, it’s that every person on this planet is going through a retrograde.

The retrograde has us looking at ourselves differently, questioning the interactions that we have with people. Part of that is the pandemic, which one would have thought would have brought us closer together, but in reality, it just showed us how many of our neighbors are choosing to remain asleep.

It’s hard when you learn that the world isn’t fair, that it’s not even, and that not everyone gets a fair piece of the pie, of course you want to share that with the people you love, but lately, it seems more and more when we point out the problems in the world, people want to act like there’s nothing they can do to change things.

There is so much power in using your voice. Y’all have been seeing me do that for six years now, so you know how to do it, the only question is do you want to?

Do you want to ensure that your voice is sending a clear message to our neighbors, community members, and politicians?

Then what are you waiting for? Permission? That’s never going to come. No one is going to invite you to speak until they see that you have something to say, and even then they’ll question everything about you. Why? Because you’re a bitch, until they get to know you.

Duh.

Sending all my love,

Devon J Hall

If you have thoughts you’d like to add about this post, please leave a message, and let’s talk about them in the comments below

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