Why I hate the S word

There has been a lot of legitimate negative reactions to both Trump and Brexit, but the one that frustrates me is to call voters stupid (or dumb, or idiots). It is something I have written a lot about and tweeted a lot about. Why? Calling someone dumb is intended as a statement of your superiority and a declaration of their inferiority. It is also intended to remind them of their place.

At the risk of stretching too much, I think back to how it “used to be.”

I grew up in the south in a small town in ‘70s and life was segregated. Everyone sorted by race. The whites were on the top and the blacks on the bottom.

For six summers I worked at the local college, which had two crews each of twenty guys. There was a paint crew and a construction crew. The paint crew was all black and the construction crew, which paid much better, was all white.

Because of my father’s friendship with the foreman of the paint crew I was assigned to it. I was an anomaly, one of only 3 white guys over those six summers who worked on it.

The racial division was just how it was. When a black man from New York City moved into town and applied for a job, a man with twenty years construction experience, fully licensed, they put him on the paint crew. He quit three days later, outraged.

We as a society just sorted by race and it was damn unfair. 
 
The two crews never overlapped. The construction crew, when they did bother to talk to me, would laugh, telling me if I kept working on the paint crew I would end up just being “another nigger. Why would you give your white skin away like that?”
 
They used the nigger word a lot. Everyone in my town and in the south did. It had many offensive meanings, but the way I saw it used, was to remind African-Americans of their place. To remind them this is just how it is. You are inferior. You are second-class. You are sub human. 
 
The fourth summer a white guy got mandated by court to work on the paint crew to fulfill his child support. He was small and consistently dirty, came from nothing. It was noted he looked like a leprechaun so he was nicknamed Lucky Pops after the Lucky Charms character.

After a month when his court mandate was done, we all celebrated Lucky Pops by taking the afternoon off and drinking beer and splurging on a few buckets of Kentucky fried chicken. 
 
Everyone got drunk and joked. We all asked Lucky Pops if he was going back to live in the swamps, or a trailer, or a car, or his ditch. It was intended as good fun, with an edge. But his retort to them was always, “Well I may be trash, but I ain’t a Nigger.”
 
It cut because they all knew he was right. He was reminding them of the natural order of things. He, regardless of all else, regardless of being just as poor as them, was white, and that meant he was superior. 
 
Now we claim not to sort by race. Or we believe we don’t (If you don’t think racism is still very much a thing, read about Selma, Alabama, or Buffalo). We have replaced admitting we sort by race, to admitting we sort by education. By intelligence. Everyone has a chance to climb to the top as long as they jump through all the educational hoops. Or so we tell ourselves.
 
It is far better than sorting by race, although given how the educational system is often stacked against minorities and people who grow up in the wrong places, it is often the same thing.

But we still have a system that is rigged and unfair. We give so much value, economic and social, to those at the top with an education, that we have created another two-tiered system.

When someone from the top tier tells someone from the bottom tier they are stupid. Or they are dumb. It is similar in goal to those nasty racial taunts.

It is designed to remind them of their inferior place. To remind them they are not as good and that this is how the system works and I am on the top and you are on the bottom.

More than that, and most importantly, it is telling them this is how it should be. You are on the bottom because you are dumb, and you deserve to be there. 
 
I am not equating the two. Racial epithet come with a whole lot more than just a reminder to minorities of their place. They come with centuries of historical context; they come with subtext of violence. They come with the subtext of taking things away.

We have not gotten there yet with our dialogue. But it is getting worse. I hope folks who are calling others stupid are doing so without fully understanding the extent to which it is offensive.

I really hope.