Tag Archives: Africa

Chink

Chink: (n) a Chinese person.

I am prejudiced against skinny people–mainly because I’m fat.

I am intimidated by handsome men, truthfully because I’m quite plain.

I get nervous around other writers because deep in my heart, I need to be the best.

And the only reason I would ever call a Chinese person a “Chink” is because deep in my heart I know he or she is superior to me in attitude and talent, and I need
a way to degrade the prowess.

Certainly white people would never have brought black slaves from Africa unless the natives were superior to them working in the fields. Even after Emancipation, the white community was intimidated that the black work ethic would overtake them and lead to their poverty. So it’s easier to call them “niggers” and send out the signal that they are to be relegated to a lesser position.

We’ve done it for years with gender. All the terms used for women have eventually exposed a disguised prejudice.

  • “Ladies”
  • “Weaker sex”
  • “Little miss”
  • And of course, “bitch”

I’m not quite sure why the word “Chink” is in the dictionary. Perhaps it’s to remind us that there will always be people who are better at what they do than we are, and simply humiliating them with a condescending name does not take away their power.

We live in an America where there is still prejudice against the black race, even though we mimic their actions, customs, worship style and sports efforts in almost every way.

If bigots actually did think they were better than the people they prey upon, it would still be disgusting, but at least comprehensible.

But knowing that bigots are mean-spirited because they are secretly jealous and wish they possessed the abilities of those they attack may be the Earthly definition of satanic.

 

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Black

Black: (adj) the very darkest color

  • Dictionary BA black comedy.
  • A black cave.
  • A black situation.
  • A black scenario.
  • A blackened sky.
  • Black as sin.

Sometimes we wonder why ignorance persists.

We muse over our alleged newfound openness and genteel demeanor concerning our differences while continuing to perpetuate myths.

First and foremost, there are really no black people. Even those who live deep in the heart of Africa are not actually black.

The human race is an unusually diverse palate of browns–even white people are peachy-beige. We apply hard names with hard definitions onto individuals in order to quietly segregate them in a conversational way, since we’ve made it illegal to do so in a general way.

Black is beautiful.

Black is classy.

Black is the new orange.

The truth is that human beings are neither black or white. They continue to be, and always will be, unpredictable.

 

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Apaches

dictionary with letter A

Apaches:(n) members of an American Indian people living primarily in New Mexico and Arizona. The Apaches put up fierce resistance to the European settlers and, under the leadership of Geronimo, were the last American Indian people to be conquered.

Sometimes I choose silence because speaking is such a minefield of “lip-slip-bombs.” It is difficult in this present age to know what to say or even what to call things without offending someone.

This is quite apparent with those original citizens who occupied the North American continent before the European settlers invaded.

(You see how carefully I worded that? Of course, I probably offended the Europeans, who would insist they “settled,” not “invaded.” Once again, you can’t win.)

But concerning these individuals, in my lifetime I have heard them called Indians, American Indians, tribal nations and Native Americans.

Even though I want to be as gentle as possible with the feelings of others, I think what we call them is not nearly as important as how we treated them, and how the treatment continues today with a sense of antipathy.

Yes, I think the American consciousness occasionally needs to be pricked by our approach to those who were here when we arrived and those we brought over from Africa to tend our fields.

We have two groups of people who have a vicious history with the white class, who continue to suffer under varying degrees of subjugation and prejudice to this day.

So I don’t know what you want to call them, and I don’t know whether it makes a difference if the Washington football team is called the Redskins or not. I think the true problem is does not lie in calling “Indians” and “Negroes,” or “African-Americans” and “Native Americans,” but rather, when you finish addressing them, the determining factor of your quality of life is in how you grant them equal quality.

  • What did the white man bring to the Apache nation? Disease, guns and whiskey.
  • What did the white man bring to the African? Slavery, punishment and the ghetto.

So I think it’s a bit pretentious to believe that simply because we choose the correct verbiage for greeting them that we’ve bridged the gap.

Actually, I would much rather call them Indians and Negroes, but love them as my brothers and sisters as opposed to referring to them by the popular lingo of the day … and sequester them in lack.

 

 

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Thank you for enjoying Words from Dic(tionary) —  J.R. Practix

Alien

Words from Dic(tionary)

dictionary with letter A

Alien: (adj.) belonging to a foreign country or nation

People are funny. (But it is a good idea not to laugh at them to their face.)

What I mean is, the boundaries we establish for personal contact and acceptability within the human race are not only bizarre, but always prove to be irrelevant.

Even though people from Africa didn’t decide to emigrate to the United States, but instead were brought over on a “Kidnap Carnival Cruise,” complete with chains and beatings, we still decided to insult them while they picked our cotton by continuing the mistreatment and relegating them to less-than-human status.

We did the same thing with the Chinese when we were building the railroad. We welcomed them to the country so they could lay our tracks, work cheap and receive a good old-fashioned American dose of abuse.

Matter of fact, every nationality which has come to this land has gone through a season of being rejected as tourists, beaten up as neighbors and eventually absorbed due to the passage of time and proving their usefulness to our general welfare.

I think what some Americans would like is to have the Mexicans come in, clean the houses, work the menial jobs, pick the fruit and lettuce–and then somehow or another, be transported back to their homes in Mexico nightly, so as not to interfere with our present “preferred mix.”

Yes, if the Southern plantation owners could have had the black folks pick cotton by day, and then jam them into a space ship to go back to the Dark Continent to sleep at night–only to return at dawn to work, we would have called that the Great American Ideal.

But doggone it, those foreigners who come here and work for us for pennies on the dollar start desiring things like citizenship, consideration and worst of all, equality.

I learned a long time ago in that what betrays me more than anything else are my needs that vary from my wants.

  • America needs cheap labor and souls who have been raised in a culture with a great work ethic.
  • The fact that we don’t want them to live next door to us creates the conflict.

So I guess the only choice is to either lessen our need or change our wants.

Yes … that will truly be an alien concept to us all.

 

Africa

Words from Dic(tionary)

dictionary with letter A

 

Africa: the second-largest continent, a southward projection of the Old World land mass divided roughly in half by the equator and surrounded by sea except where the Isthmus of Suez joins it to Asia.

I am shocked.

I sat down to write a clever essay on today’s word, Africa. when I dug into my Middle-America, middle-class, middle-intelligent and middle-conscience mind,  all I was able to conjure were images which I must be honest and tell you, seem quite racist.

Because when I think of Africa, I think of missionaries, cannibals, lions, monkeys, tribal rituals, Apartheid, jungles, Serengeti, antelopes being chased and killed, and people with black skin talking with extremely articulate British accents.

I thought about trying to come up with something different, pretending that I am cultured and aware of modern Africa and the progress the people have made. Or tip my hat to the notion that Africa is the “mother land of the whole human race,” but I realized it would be phony, and I would just be another American trying to appear that I am free of prejudice, when the truth is that, contrary to that fact, the continent reminds me of Tarzan and Jane.

I do not think we become better people by hiding our iniquity.

I do not think that I can fool you into believing I am a cosmopolitan world traveler who is free of my Central Ohio upbringing, and still walk away with a pure soul.

Here’s what I WILL say about Africa: most of what I learned as a child about this magnificent continent had something to do with either the zoo or the Zulu.

No one took the time to teach me anything else.

So even though I am grown and people insist that I’m set in my ways, I am unsettled enough to accept this meager representation of a great history and people. So I apologize for my lacking by trying to increase. Now that I have been alerted to my limitation, I will attempt to expand my borders.

We will never know what Africa could truly be today because it was invaded, attacked and robbed of its citizenry by white people who thought they were better.

I am an ancestor of such folk. For this I apologize.

But the best way I can express my contrition is by continuing to learn instead of assume.

 

Abroad

by J. R. Practix

dictionary with letter A

Abroad: (adv.): 1. in or to a foreign country or countries: we usually go abroad for a week in June 2. in different directions; over a wide area: the seeds were scattered abroad.

I always wanted to say “abroad.” Unfortunately, you must have a certain amount of money, clout and look good in an Ascot to be able to mutter the word. I once tried wearing an Ascot, but it ended up looking like I had tied a fancy piece of cloth around my neck to cover up an ugly goiter.

“Abroad” is one of those words people used when I was a kid to refer to countries that were not nearly as freedom-loving as America, but had much prettier stuff. It amazed me that the United States was the greatest nation on earth but you had to go to Greece to see the Parthenon, Paris to check out the Eiffel Tower and London to hear Big Ben ring his chimes.

Maybe that’s the whole problem–we settle for mediocrity in our own lives while maintaining comfort, but yearn to go “abroad” to check out the really cool stuff. I don’t know when “abroad” became “overseas,”  or then changed to specifics like Europe, Africa, Australia.

But I still think if I ever became wealthy, I would be tempted to rub it into people’s noses by telling them I was going to the ambiguous nation of “abroad” so as to make them wonder for a longer period of time, exactly how exotic my destination might be.

I did try it once. I was going on a trip to Toronto, Canada, and informed some friends that I would be out-of-pocket for a few weeks because I would be “abroad.” Looking at me like I had just registered a really loud belch, they inquired exactly where “abroad” was going to be.

I wanted to lie. I really wanted to make up some country that none of them would be familiar with, but frightened to question lest they appeared ignorant. But my nasty penchant for telling the truth, mingled with my lack of creative spontaneity, caused me to blurt out, “Canada.”

They all thought this was hilarious. For after all, EVERYONE knows–Canada is not abroad. It’s attached.

There’s the rule. You can’t say you’re going abroad if where you’re going is hooked to your homeland.  So “abroad” is anything that requires you cross a body of water.

And I think that would mean an ocean instead of a creek.

Abreast

by J. R. Practix

dictionary with letter A

Abreast: (adv.): 1. side by side and facing the same way: the path was wide enough for two people to walk abreast 2. alongside or even with something: the car came abreast of the idling motorcycle.

I am taking a moment here to get all of my fourth-grade male giggles out of my system so I can talk rationally about the word “abreast.” I don’t need to bore you or cause you to lose respect for me by sharing some of the jokes that came to my mind when I first encountered today’s word. Let us just say that there is a small child who lives within me, and even though I try to starve him, he scrounges for scraps and survives.

But the word “abreast” struck me today–from a more mature place in my soul–as the description of the equality we desire in our human family and relationships.

But the teeter-totter approach to gaining equality, where for a brief season we extol one group of people as better than others, to try to even the playground, only to rush over and put more weight on the other side in an attempt to keep the game going,  seems not only to be ridiculous, but counter-intuitive with being abreast–side by side.

I don’t know–maybe black people who had been snatched from Africa might have found the experience tolerable if every day their white counterparts were sweating in the field right next to them, picking cotton, instead of sitting in the big house sipping mint juleps.

Is it possible that men and women would discover more similarities in their character if they actually did more things together?

It is going to be difficult to achieve equality in our world until we come to the conclusion that we were meant to be abreast–right next to each other, involved in the same projects without discrimination.

The same spirit that is deemed repugnant when a man says, “The little woman needs to be in the kitchen rattling the pots and pans…” is equally as nasty when the overwrought female on the situation comedy informs her husband, “You’d be a helluva lot happier if you’d just do what I told you.”

One is viewed as misogyny and the other as comedy. Why can’t they both just be stupid?

I am not interested in anyone being inferior to me, nor will I tolerate their superiority.

Come abreast–if you can stop your fourth-grade brain from giggling.

Abeokuta

by J. R. Practix

dictionary with letter A

Abeokuta: a city in southwestern Nigeria, capital of the state of Ogun; pop. 308,800

You see, all he wanted to do was give out Bibles to natives. He certainly wasn’t interested in acquiring finance. His only concern was to provide the Word of God to lost souls in Nigeria who did not have any way of learning the truth of the salvation plan because they lacked a book to explain it to them.

He wrote me a lengthy letter to share his vision and also reinforce his credentials, listing numerous universities and organizations which were most definitely acquainted with his passion.

I was about eight or nine long paragraphs into this plea from Africa, when suddenly my the writer pointed out to me that even though he was not interested in money, a certain amount of cash would be necessary–along with the shipment of Bibles–as a tariff on all products from America, even if they were in black covers stamped with the word “Holy.”

So along with sending him a hundred Bibles, it would be necessary for me to include a wire transfer of $250 to cover those taxes and charges, so as to ensure that some desperately befuddled Nigerian would receive illumination from on high.

As a courtesy, he included the procedure by which I should transfer these funds–as soon as possible–even before the Bibles were shipped! After all, who knows when the monies would  be needed?

I do believe he was from Abeokuta.

I must confess to you, heathen that I am, I passed on this remarkable opportunity, kept my bank account intact and was forced to resort to a simple prayer for all those potentially damned Nigerians, who would be vacant of redemption due to the absence of my Bible shipment.

Such events do not make me cynical. They actually serve to make me more voracious in my appetite to find the authentic.