Sometimes, well-intended grown-ups give really terrible advice to children. This realization has become increasingly clear to me as I parent my own kids and re-evaluate some of the hard, fast mantras that stuck in my head as Gospel truth until common sense beat me upside the head and dethroned them.
“You can be anything you want to be,” for example. Why do we say this to kids? It’s absolute hogwash. I personally knew a guy in his early 20s who spent 5+ hours in the gym every day, convinced he was NBA-bound. He had never even made the high school team. He was a 6’1” white guy who couldn’t even dunk. Bad advice.
“Follow your heart” is another one. The Bible wisely cautions that “The heart is deceitful above all else.” How many people can we collectively think of who’ve followed their hearts straight off a cliff? Not wise counsel.
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But the sentiment I’ve been really stewing on this week is this: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.”
What kind of dissociative gaslighting nonsense is this? Why in God’s green earth are we teaching it to children? Worse yet, why, do we, as adults, so often live our lives as though we actually believe it is true? If the Bible says that “Life and death are in the power of the tongue,” why are we so quick to override biblical truth with our own narrative that denies the power of words?
Now listen, I understand that I’m writing into a culture that’s marked by victim mentalities and relentless invitations to compete in the oppression Olympics. I understand we have a pretty big problem where high percentages of people aged 25 and under seem to sincerely believe they are entitled to a world where no one ever dares to hurt their feelings. It’s an issue, as is the hypocrisy protecting these maladaptive mentalities. I’ve watched the same institutions that exiled lesbians for the “hate crime” of accurate pronoun use turn a blind eye as raging antisemites behaved like actual Nazis and physically terrorized Jewish students off of college campuses. I’ve seen truth framed as violence, and as something of a free speech absolutist myself, I understand the danger of treating words as actual violence when they’re not.
Your feelings are not deserving of legal protections. Banning speech, however unpleasant, does nothing to solve the problem. It just prevents you from having to look at it and allows you to live in denial of the reality that these other opinions exist in the same world as you.
But there’s a quantum leap between believing the government should not be permitted to infringe on people’s right to speak and believing that words are inconsequential, and it sure does seem to me that a lot of people are having a really hard time occupying the grey area between those two extremes. Just because the government shouldn’t be able to control your tongue does not mean that you shouldn’t be expected to control it yourself.
Full disclosure: This entire rant was inspired by a situation in Minnesota last week that is now national news. A white woman named Shiloh Hendrix was visiting a Rochester park with her 18-month-old when she spotted a little black boy rifling through her belongings. In a now viral video clip, another park attendee records Shiloh as she goes off on a racist tirade, repeatedly referring to the little boy as a “n*gger” and dropping expletives left and right in response.
My mom heart cried when I watched it. I hit stop before forcing myself to watch it again. Was the little boy wrong to be digging through her stuff? Absolutely. Did he know better? Of course he did. Should she have confronted him about it? 100%. But rather than gently and firmly setting a boundary and correcting the behavior, this woman went off the deep end in a profoundly abusive manner, dehumanizing this little boy and resorting to racist pejoratives and slurs. “If he’s going to act like a n*gger, that’s what I’m going to call him,” she insisted. I was honestly horrified by what I saw.
But what was even more horrifying to me is that when I turned to social media, quite a few of my personal contacts were defending the woman and encouraging people to donate to the GiveSendGo campaign set up to help her relocate after the internet doxxed her, allegedly threatening the physical safety of her family.
“Why are you more upset about a stupid word than you are about the illegal immigrants ruining towns like hers?” they asked me. “You have an obvious bias toward ethno-religious minorities,” insisted another friend.
But so far, this park lady has raised over $600k in support, and I find this discouraging on a number of levels. They’ve made her a hero. “Finally! Someone is defending white people. There’s nothing wrong with the ‘n’ word. Get over it,” they insist, ignoring more than a century of deeply painful, wicked, and actually violent history.
I’m a writer, so maybe that makes me extra sensitive to the power of words. But I’m also an abuse survivor who knows how words can be strategically used to break a human spirit. I still cannot hear a man refer to a woman as a “c*nt” without breaking out in hives, for example. My body has a visceral response to that term because it was so repeatedly used to make me feel like I was lower than dirt. And as the mother of a mixed-race child who has actually been called the “n” word at school, I personally witnessed the pain such words can cause to already vulnerable people who are just trying to figure out where they fit in the world.
Words matter and feelings matter because our hearts matter to God. The Bible tells us to guard our hearts because they are the wellspring of life. And it also tells us to guard our tongues because we can do so much damage to other image bearers. So again, why are so many of us behaving as though this is not the case?
I’ve written before about our tendency on the right to sanctimoniously believe that we have the monopoly on common sense. We try to disembody the human experience by dividing emotion and logic and pitting them against each other as enemies. We buy into the notion that emotion is bad and logic is good. Emotion is leftist; reason is Republican. “Facts don’t care about your feelings,” after all, right?
Well, I think this is really stupid. The fact of the matter is that feelings mobilize people to act. So if you care about effecting change, you had best learn to care about and speak to how people feel.
Words can hurt. Words can divide. We have no business defending adults who hurl the “n” word at small children. We are not the good guys when we do this. I don’t care how awful the other side behaves. I’m not responsible for their behavior. I’m responsible for mine.
Kaeley Harms, co-founder of Hands Across the Aisle Women’s Coalition, is a Christian feminist who rarely fits into boxes. She is a truth teller, envelope pusher, Jesus follower, abuse survivor, writer, wife, mom, and lover of words aptly spoken.
