Wojtek Sokolowski:
> A few questions:
>
> 1. What does "ownership" or control" of a concept concept mean? Language
> is a perfect example of a public or collective good, i.e. meaning of
> concept must be shared by members of a group or the concept is
> incomprhensible gibberish. Hence the metephor "ownership of a concept"
> seems quite meaningless, outsied the patent law that gives the right to
> exclusive use of certain concepta or image for commercial purposes.
I hardly know where to begin. Ruling classes and prestige groups have spent enormous time and effort to control language and the concepts it represents, and still do. Sometimes they succeed; sometimes they don't. When they do, they can be said to "own" the words and the concepts; for instance, White men created the word _negro_ and with it the concept of the negro which had previously not existed, and defined who the negroes were and how they were to be treated.
At that time, the objects of their attention, being slaves, had little to say about it, so we could say that White men owned and controlled the word and related words and concepts. Later that would change -- we have in fact been discussing a late outcome of that process, which, as I said, has now escaped from the hands and purposes of its inventors.
A history of the two-way relationship between the manifold aspects of language and political power would be encyclopedia- size.
> 2. What is "common African origins"? I thought that inhabitants of the
> African (sub-Saharan to ve more precise) identifies themselves by their
> ethnic and tribal identities, rather than as "Africans." Those ethnic and
> tribal differences were ignored by outsiders who saw them simply as
> "Blacks" or "Africans" - but that is a very prejudiced view, no? Europeans
> tend to be seen as separate ethnic identities, e.g. Italians, Germans,
> Poles, Jews, Irish etc. - why can't we see Africans as separate ethnic
> identities instead of identities given to them by outsiders?
Some things are common to West Africa, just as some things are common to Western Europe, to Southern Asia, to Eastern Asia, and so on. As far as I know, separate ethnicity and religion were almost entirely suppressed in the African population brought to the Americas as slaves. What remained were fragments of the ancestral cultures mixed together, often concealed under European symbols (e.g. Santa Barbara in Santeria). When we talk about the present Africa, it is appropriate to talk about the traditional ethnic groups, but in bringing slaves to the Americas and depriving them of these ethnicities, the slavers created a space in which a new ethnicity came into existence, congealed one might say by the way in which the constituents were sealed off from the larger society first by slavery and later by segregation.
> 3. What is "habitual fighting about categories" in which White mean are
> supposed to engage? What categories? Which Wgite mean? How is that
> fighting conducted?
For instance, White men have fought extensively and at length over what was to be done with and to Black persons, even to the point of an all-out civil war in the United States. There has likewise been considerable contention over the disposition of many other categories. Typically the conflicts have been led and largedly _manned_ by persons we categorize as "White" and "male", e.g. presidents, senators, congressmen, governors, other politicans, military leaders, clergymen, academics, publishers and other businessmen, union leaders, artists, entertainers, and so on. The appearance of non-White, non-male persons in these categories has been until recently quite a rarity, except maybe among small radical groups. The conflicts were generally carried on without asking the objects of the conflict much about what they thought or desired. When the objects have chosen to enter the discourse, their behavior has often been suprising to White men; for example, the decision of the Black Civil Rights organizations in the late 1960s to, pretty much, kick White people out, with the suggestion that they attend to their own communities and problems. Analogous events and turns have occurred in many other areas.
> 4. I always thought that language is a refelction of reality, not the other
> way around.
If there's some distinct thing we can objectify and designate as "reality", then surely language is part of it.
> Thus, changing the language (or its emotive connotations) does
> not change the reality itself (the explaining vs. changing the world
> thing). Are you trying to tell me that it aint so, and when Blacks, Poles,
> Jews, Italians, Germans, or inhabitants of mobile home parks start using
> words like "n-word," "polack", "kike", "wop," "kraut" or "trailer trash" -
> their position in society mysteriously changes?
It might. Certainly the term "queer" was successfully appropriated. Others are being contested even as we speak. We may regret that this sort of thing is taking place, but nevertheless it proceeds. It seems inevitable given the durability of caste systems and the language with which they are framed and maintained on one side, and the opposing determination of people to live and value their lives on the other -- because their lives include their histories, their Jerusalems beside the waters of Babylon. I can't imagine a Black person who would want to see his or her Blackness as rationalization of existing inequality, as if they were some kind of inferior, unlucky White people; they want to see it as something to glory in.