The Transformative Power of a Single Word

• Lucinda J. Garthwaite, EdD, ILI Director

I am a word nerd. I once sat past midnight with some poet friends in graduate school, reading the names for various groups of animals from a dictionary, exclaiming with actual glee over a pandemonium of parrots, a smack of jellyfish, a bloat of hippos. Seriously, we were at it for hours.
 
Those kinds of words are worth a chuckle, and then I move on.  Other words are stop signs at T-intersections, the kind of words that require me to turn. Lately I’m noticing more of these.
 
I’m thinking for example of the word, repair and its extension, reparation, which in general terms means to make things right after a wrong. The case for social reparation is not new; it’s in the Hebrew bible, for example, specifically referring to reparations for slavery and caste.
 
Although the United States originally promised reparations (“40 acres and mule”) for slavery, those promises were not kept. Michigan member of congress John Conyers introduced a bill to study reparations at every session of congress for thirty years. It’s just been taken up in 2021.

The word reparations has recently come into more public prominence, with both serious consideration and renewed resistance to the possibility of reparations for colonization, genocide and slavery in the U.S. U.S. writer and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates makes what I consider a deeply compelling case for this kind of reparation in a 2014 essay in The Atlantic magazine.* When Coates uses the word reparations, he means, “the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences . . more than recompense for past injustices. What [Coates is] talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal.”

Reckoning is a word that stopped me some time back, and made me turn, and has driven my behavior since. So reparation as a part of reckoning hascaught my attention, and caused me to wonder what it would mean for my own behavior to be reparative. I have to stop and think: what would it mean for me to behave in a way that addresses past injustices and contributes to a reckoning that leads to spiritual renewal? What would it mean for the ILI to be a reparative organization? That question now drives our Board’s decisions about policy and practice at the most basic level.

See? One word, “reparation” was a stop sign, and required a turn.

Here’s another example: extractive. On its own this word just means removing something, for instance in terms of chemistry, as in extracting one part of a compound from the whole. The nonprofit, Climate Nexus defines extraction in a social justice context as “removing value from its environment, exporting it for use mainly by the elite of “western” (white) economies, and discarding it when finished.”

The word extraction used in a social change context applies even to social change work itself. For example, as organizations recognize a need to make systems more equitable, a market opens for social change insight. Arguably, there’s nothing wrong with that on its face.

But social change insight is often hard-won through the challenging and even tragic experiences of communities deeply affected by injustice. If those insights are commodified and sold without consent from and benefit to communities where the insights were forged, then social change strategy itself becomes extractive.

Stop sign. The ILI is in the business of learning and creating change strategies based on that learning. We need to be very careful about extraction.

Reparation and extraction are old words that I see differently in a social change context. Completely new words, especially those created with intention, can also stop me in my tracks. ILI Senior Research Associate Jordan Laney introduced me to one such word just this week, Affrilachian.

The poet, multi-disciplinary artist, activist, and teacher Frank X. Walker coined the word Affrilachian over a decade ago. Walker was at a conference for Appalachian writers, noted that he was one of two Black writers in attendance, decided to check a dictionary, and saw that the word “Appalachians” specifically referred to white people who live in the Appalachian mountain region of the U.S.

So Walker made up a word to make visible Black poets and artists of the region. In the years since, a whole movement, area of study, and communities of artists have emerged from just that one word. In the days since Jordan introduced me to the word Affrilachian, I’ve discovered poets and artists that have challenged my thinking, and introduced me to new perspectives. I’m starting to see how that will require me to turn.

One new word opens a window where there was a wall. One old word is a sturdy boat, carrying me across a river I didn’t know I needed to cross.

If this is a transformative time, and I believe it is, then I want to know as much as I can about the places from which transformation can come. I’m reminded this week that a single word is often such a place.

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Note: All of the resources mentioned here are linked in the May 28, 2021 Issue of Intersections: The ILI Newsletter