At the University of Idaho’s latest Black Lives Matter Speaker Series, guest speaker Claudia Allen selected prominent figures across past and present social movements to examine how they used language to bring about meaningful change.
From the civil rights movement to the BLM movement, Allen detailed how leaders’ approaches to language have differed, ultimately playing a role in their pursuits of racial justice.
Allen, who has a master’s degree in English, highlighted her academic background as foundational in her research of these leaders and the movements they were part of.
During her literary studies, she learned of a particular theory highlighting the power language holds over ones’ lived experience. According to Allen, the theory says our material reality is a consequence of the language we use.
“We see that language is what constructs our very reality, and it constructs the boundaries within which we live and move, and it determines who has access to what,” Allen said.
This theoretical framework has shaped her approach to matters of social justice, influencing how she views language and rhetoric as a vehicle for changing the current landscape on an individual and systemic level.
“What if we just created language that genuinely allowed humanity to exist and move and thrive in the fullness of their being?” Allen said.
It is with this foundational query that her speaking event “Say it Loud, Black Lives Matter” was founded upon.
Allen opened the event emphasizing how language has served as an integral tool for advancing interests of the Black community. Its function, however, is determined by both its intent and interpretation.
“Language is intimately attached to terrorism and injustice as well as freedom and resistance,” Allen said.
To highlight language’s destructive potential, Allen referenced author and Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison. She cited Morrison’s 2015 article in The Nation, where Morrison “admonishes us to do language.”
“Morrison reminds us that language is not arbitrary or absent-minded speech, but a powerful action central to the healing of civilizations, and thus most critical in any nation’s time of tragedy and despair,” Allen said.
According to Allen, language is to blame for the assigning of superiority and inherent value to white Europeans and the assigning of “inferiority, criminality and immorality” to both African and Native Americans.
“In order to combat such narrative lies, African Americans employed the use of language to reestablish their humanity, their value and provide themselves the encouragement that they needed,” Allen said.
To illustrate this, Allen shifted her examination of language by recounting the inspiration for part of the event’s title: “Say it Loud.”
Following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., singer and songwriter James Brown “felt that African Americans needed a reminder of their value, penning ‘say it loud, I’m Black and I’m proud,’” Allen said.
Even though this language was intended to function as a “chant of racial, ethnic and cultural pride,” white audiences perceived the song as empowering an underclass, which would upend the historical narratives of the time in addition to their status in society, Allen said.
The disconnect between segments of society emphasized how the interpretation of language by the dominating group was a major factor in its reception.
Through an examination of Martin Luther King Jr.’s utilization of rhetorical strategies, Allen explained how prior language of historical and cultural prominence could be used as an instigator for unification. With the rhetoric used in the March on Washington, King underscored the need to uphold language written in the nation’s founding documents.
“When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was the promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” King stated in his famous speech.
By drawing on this common understanding of America’s foundational principles, according to Allen, King made it clear in his language the civil rights movement was “requesting equity.”
Allen also highlighted author James Baldwin’s utilization of language’s destructive power as a force for positive change, a method of contrast to King’s.
“While King is calling for and using economic language to call for the social, the legal, the moral and financial reparations of African Americans on the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, Baldwin is calling for the composition of new rules,” Allen said.
These “new rules” were focused primarily on a rejection of the religious landscape at the time.
Baldwin had called on the Black community to institute language that addressed problems with American Christianity to allow for the institution of “a new God who is a better advocate for their current troubles.”
Through his use of language to destroy current systems in the effort to create new ones, “Baldwin is suggesting (Black people) must advocate or activate a kind of justice for themselves, that seeks to destroy the oppressive languages and systems…until an imagined better day,” Allen said.
Allen’s examination of past and present leaders concluded with minister and Distinguished Professor of African American and Diaspora Studies Michael Eric Dyson.
In his book, “Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America,” Dyson writes that all humans, regardless of religious background, “share a language of moral repair.”
“This is the language that, regardless of community, sees time does not heal all wounds, our redemption and our hope can never be an eventuality but will come only in the power of linguistic intentionality,” Allen said. “Language constructs and destroys our society.”
After thoroughly dissecting the varied linguistic approaches of prominent Black leaders, Allen concluded with an explanation of what justice means with the fight for racial equity.
“Racial justice, for me, is advocacy for wholeness within the human family,” Allen said.
Royce McCandless can be reached at [email protected] or Twitter @roycemccandless