Race Slang

After much internal debate and frustration I have come to learn to sit in silence and keep my big mouth shut when it comes to race slang.

I have met some pretty great people and can say I've made some good friends....they are smart, intelligent, kind people...but we have one thing that seperates us and makes us differentiate in opinion and thinking...that's our upbringing. They have been raised in Africa, me Canada.

Canada, and the Canadian educational system takes pride in claiming "our home and native land" to be one big happy multicultural family. As kids, we are raised to cringe at words such as "nigger" while white South Africans are raised with words that meet the equivalent such as "kaffa" and "munt"...that are said in a family home just as "hello" is...and that's no exaggeration.

After a month here I felt angry and frustrated at how so many educated, kind white South Africans can walk around saying these words like they are not hateful and terrible. When I heard them I heard colonialism and apartheid and I just wanted to get angry. My boyfriend, who feels the same as I do about the words sat down with me and made a very very good point. While he admitted the slang to be as wrong as it sounds he asked me to take a closer look at my "race friendly" country I call Canada. While a cocasion Canadian knows better then not to make a degrogatory comment towards an afro-Canadian, they will still turn around and put that hate towards a Canadian Aboriginal...or more recently in the West, towards an Asian...suddenly, I realized that words such as "Indian" and "Chink" flowed out of a Canadians mouth just as swiftly as black slang out of the mouth of a South African. "What"...my boyfriend said to me, "is the bloody difference?". A little bit dumbstruck I sat for a moment and realized he was right...many Canadians are total hippacrites...as we send our money over to Africa and cry elephant tears over World Vision commercials, we forget more and more about our own issues in our own backyard....and most of all our issues up North on the reserves.

None of these words are right, they take away self-confidence from an individual...they cause war and hate crimes...no race slang should be validated...because when vocalized it has just as much damage as an ak-47. Now, I'm in no way validating my new friends choice of vocabulary, but i'm not validating my Canadian friends as well...and most of all I'm not putting myself on a pedistool saying i'm perfect. We all have to watch what we say, because every country suffers from a form of harsh racism.