You've got to be taught to hate and to fear

Time travel is a very strange phenomenon. How else to explain that in 2007 we are fighting over the use of words like "nigger," "bitch," "Queer," and "Nappy-headed hos?"

We must be caught in a 1950's time warp. It must be a time before the civil rights movement, the women's movement and Stonewall. I thought all of these questions were settled in the late 1960s and 70s. Who would have thought they would be back to haunt us in 2007?

Words are weapons because they do hurt people (despite the childhood shibboleth about "sticks and stones" and "bones") but clearly these words are also symptoms of a much deeper disease plaguing our society -- hatred and prejudice. And therein lies the problem with focusing only on the words and their speakers and not on the cultures that create and nurture them. I doubt that getting Don Imus off the airwaves changed what the talk radio audience finds funny. I also doubt that a Sharpton-led Knick boycott (unless Isiah Thomas apologizes for his videotape suggesting that it's more acceptable for a Black man to call a Black woman a "bitch" than for a white man to do so) will change the male athlete's (Black or white) culture.

The scariest aspect of all this is how easy it is for these weapons to hide under rocks in this society until it's again safe to come out (particularly after nearly thirty years of right-wing cultural domination).

We will never defang these weapons until we confront racism, sexism and homophobia at the earliest moments in a child's socialization, in the family and the school.

As Rogers and Hammerstein told us in song:

You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear,
You’ve got to be taught from year to year,
It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear—
You’ve got to be carefully taught
....

You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late—
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate—
You’ve got to be carefully taught!
You’ve got to be carefully taught!