If You're Angry and You Know It

 I love my granddaughter.

What I mean is, I really love my granddaughter. She's five now, almost grown, but still my Babay Girl. She lived with us for a while when she was little, because my daughter was a young mom herself. In some ways, you could say that I got robbed of the traditional "spoil them and split" experience that most grandparents get, but I'm not sure why that's supposed to be a good thing anyway. When she's with us, or whenever we're on the phone, I try to treat her like another of my own children, the best I can. She has her father, but I can also fill in some gaps and father her without overstepping or crossing boundaries. 

One thing that I love about her is how resilient and honest she is. She's been through some stuff, both seen and experienced some disappointments that have aged her in that way that life does to little kids sometimes. "Wise beyond their years," we say, forgetting that the wisdom we're praising comes with a price. It's cost her some of her childhood to get that wisdom.

For instance, we went on our annual camping trip, just me and the girls without my grandson, because you have to be night potty trained to sleep in a tent with me. It's her second trip, her (one year younger) auntie's first, so she knows more of the routines - the sleeping arrangements, activities, cooking over a fire and whatnot. The first night of the trip, the sun has gone down and everyone is around the campfire, several families with someone leading in happy kids songs, and she gets that look that tells me she's about to drop some knowledge.

"Papa," she says, serious as she can be, "why do they say 'If you're happy and you know it stomp your feet'? You're supposed to stomp your feet when you're mad."

I didn't have an answer for her. She's so right. It's weird. The song is so weird, too. Why am I so happy? And why are there so many different ways to show it? Instead, I responded the same way I always do when she stuns us with some deep thoughts.

"You're so right, Baby Girl," I said, "That's crazy."

She nodded and went back to licking the marshmallow off the sides of her hand. I thought about it for a while longer, looking up into the night sky and getting more serious than I should for the occasion. I Tweeted about it (because saying "I x-ted about it" is stupid) to record the moment and so the family could weigh in. Then I forgot all about it.

That is, I forgot about it until a couple of weeks later when I was listening to the audiobook of She Deserves Better by Sheila Wray Gregoire (great book, by the way). At one point, she referred to the song, noting that the lyrics used to be different. Apparently, the song used to be about all the emotions, all kinds of different feelings and how to show them. That specific line really did used to go "If you're angry and you know it, stomp your feet." And Baby Girl is so right; that makes a lot more sense. I looked up the original lyrics, which are hard to find, believe it or not, and sure enough, they're all there. Apparently, if you're sad and you want to show it, you can cry boo-hoo. If you're scared and you want to show it, you can either shout "oh no" or run away, depending on which lyrics source you trust more. There's even one for if you're sleepy, which encourages kids to take a nap, which is something I've always endorsed myself.

I was so shocked, as if a major part of my own childhood had been a lie, which, I guess, it kind of was. The original song goes back almost a century, probably Russian, and got to English audiences around the 1940's, possibly. But what happened since then? When did we decide that it was inappropriate for kids to be sad or angry or scared? When did we banish all the so-called darker emotions and start telling kids that if they felt any of them and they knew it, they weren't allowed to show it?

Besides her wisdom and perception, another thing I love about my granddaughter is her resilience. With everything she's been through, she's learned not only to express her emotions and ask for things in more constructive ways, but she also helps take care of her little brother, and even leads her (younger) auntie with so much patience. That's an odd sentence, I know, but still impressive. When Baby Girl was three and early four, she used to either throw tantrums or just lock up completely when she got overwhelmed with emotions. Trying to get her to calm down and stop screaming, in some cases, or to open up and say words in others, was a daily trial. And the overwhelming emotion could be a bright one, not just sadness or anger. If she got a toy she really liked for Christmas, she might get so happy about it that she would freeze for a minute. 

Now that she's five, going on six, she's learned much better ways to express herself. She gets angry, and might even scream, but instead of a wild, incoherent scream, it's more of a focused, articulate scream. "Give that back!" is something I can deal with. She has a vocabulary that matches her moods, and she usually feels authorized to use it. Sometimes she might have to whisper it in your ear, or work herself up to it, but she gets it out. She shows it.

The whole discovery about the song is making me rethink the way a lot of us grew up. I'm trying to remember times when the grown-ups in my life really backed me when I was angry or sad or scared, and I have to say, I'm drawing a blank. It's like those emotions were too inconvenient or dark for the people around me, and they'd really rather just see me clapping and stomping and shouting in happiness, even if that wasn't what I was feeling at the time. Even as a parent, I think I can remember times when I might have redirected the some of the kids away from their emotions with distractions or commanded them to hide what they were feeling. I try not to do that anymore, and just get the littles to talk through their feelings, breathe through the moment. One thing anyone with much older and younger kids will probably tell you is that the youngest ones get the best Christmas presents and the best parents.

I can't go back to the older kids and change my parenting style, so maybe they can consider this an apology. But I can commit to doing better by the littles, helping them to identify their emotions and express them. The hard thing, the thing that's really going to take some effort and patience, is doing the same for myself. For those of us who grew up in an era where every verse was "happy," and every movement was only allowed to express that one emotion, it's difficult to be more honest, to allow ourselves to feel the feelings we feel, and to show them to others and risk upsetting them. There's so much unresolved, unprocessed anger and sadness today. Just scrolling through my social media feed, I get endless videos of road rage and public fights. This tells me two things: 1) That the grownups don't know how to manage their emotions any better than the kids, and 2) That I should stop clicking on every fight video in my feed.

So going forward, how about we all try to do better? If you're angry and you know it, stomp your feet, punch a bag, sprint a mile. If you're sad and you know it, cry boo-hoo, write it down, sing the blues. If you're scared and you know it, say "oh no," call a friend, meditate. Take your time, though. Sometimes, the hardest part is knowing it.

Whose Words Matter?

Recently, teacher Twitter flamed into uproar over a list of words compiled by a teacher who penalizes students for using them in their class. Aside from the truly draconian nature of the rule - students have to write an essay if they even slip and use one of the slang words in class - most people noticed that the list of slang words seemed decidedly focused on one culture. Every word on the list originates with Black slang or some form of AAVE.

The idea of Black students being penalized in the classroom or other academic and professional spaces is nothing new, and not even limited to the classroom. Around the same time that the list of banned words was lighting little fires all over Twitter, another grammar warrior went after Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett.

His contention was that she used the word "y'all," and that she may have mixed up the past and present at some point. If you follow the thread (at your own risk, of course, I certainly don't suggest it), you'll see he's got a lot to say about Congresswoman Crockett's speech patterns. Why he's chosen her as an example of poor speaking skills in a political body that includes Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert is anyone's guess, but he certainly seems passionate about scouring videos of Ms. Crockett's speeches with a focus on, in his words, diction.

Now, I don't have a bachelor's degree in psychology like Eric does, so I might lack the credentials to speak on politics, vaccines, and American history. However, I do have a graduate degree in English, several published works, and over twenty-five years of experience teaching the language, so I consider myself something of an expert on its usage. In my opinion, Ms. Crockett is a powerful speaker who clearly knows how to leverage formal academic language in her argument, as well as punctuating and emphasizing her points with more colloquial language. Her use of language is extremely effective, and a technique that older, white, male representatives and senators use all the time - that combination of formal language mixed with folksy aphorisms and word choices that sets up the speaker as both knowledgable and a person of the people. 

It's called code switching, and we all do it, just not for the same reasons.

Personally, I have about five or six English dialects that I use, both in and out of the classroom. They range in formality from highly academic to nearly "broken" English. As surprising as it seems, I don't whisper into my wife's ear with the same diction and syntax that I use to project across a room full of colleagues when I give a seminar. My students generally get a mixture of the academic and the deeply personal, the language of the critic infused with the language of a real reader with real feelings and sensibilities responding to the text. I use code switching in class because my job is to teach my students to use the full range of language, to abide by the rules when required or necessary, but then to bend and even break them when doing so is more effective.

But some of my students code switch for other reasons. Some of them code switch because their careers or even their lives may depend on other's perceptions of them. In a society where even their name can get their resume deleted out of a slush pile if it's too Black-coded, the risk of letting any verbal Blackness show can have negative repercussions. See, if a Congresswoman with a doctorate level law degree can be openly challenged on her speaking abilities by a guy with a BS in Psychology, and a high school teacher can ban any language that smacks of Blackness from her classroom, it's not the language itself that's under attack.

In fact, this open attack on Black slang raises some very important questions I'd love to ask the creator of that list, if anyone knew who they were. What sorts of texts do their students read? Is all informal dialect banned from their classroom, or just the ones coded Black? If the students are allowed to read Mark Twain, are they allowed to read Zora Neale Hurston as well? Or are both of them too "improper" and "inappropriate" for the academic setting. In my experience, teachers and professors with such strict policies about slang and appropriate language have always found arguments for including Shakespeare and Twain in the canon, but never Hurston or James Baldwin. The white authors get their praise for "innovative use of language" and "playfulness with conventions," but the Black writers never seem to get the same benefit of the doubt.

This is what's so wrong about the list. This teacher will never give their Black students the benefit of the doubt. Their critiques, responses, and feelings will be disregarded as invalid and "inappropriate" if they aren't worded in a way that's coded "academic," which seems to skew too much to the white.

On the other hand, I'd also ask the creator of the list whether some of those slang words and phrases couldn't be acceptable, or even perfectly suited, for a discussion about literature. Instead of blank stares or fearful, timid, safe half-responses, I would die of joy if a student, any student, would comment on a text like Frankenstein or Mexican Gothic with something like "It's giving me Edgar Allen Poe." Heck, I would even take a response to Poe like "It's giving Wednesday vibes." 

Rizz might just be the most precise word to describe Richard's seduction of Anne in Shakspeare's Richard III. Richard literally has nothing else going for him - not looks, not power, not even really wealth - and yet somehow gets this woman to fall for him, and that after killing her father-in-law. Are there more academic ways to make the point? Perhaps, but a high school student might not have the vocabulary for that argument, and even so, some of the more formal words might not have the exactness for the occasion that rizz does. If I have to choose between staring at an oil painting of a class groping for some elusive formal vocabulary and some kid saying, "that guy is the rizz master," my response will definitely be, "Yes, he certainly has mastered the art of rizz. Let's unpack that response."

"That's cap" could be an insightful response to Iago's "Put money in thy purse" speech, which uses a fair amount of slang itself. In fact, when you consider the sheer tonnage of slang that Shakespeare produced, and how much of it has passed into common, even formal usage, the whole argument against slang falls apart.

Louise Bennett said it best in her poem "Bans a Killin." In response to the same tirade against "dialec," she points out that nobody is suggesting a ban on English dialect and slang, only Jamaican. Towards the end of her poem, she says that if you really want to "kill" all dialect, "Yuh wi haffi get de Oxford Book / A English Verse, an tear / Out Chaucer, Burns, Lady Grizelle / An plenty a Shakespeare! / When yuh done kill 'wit' an 'humour', / When yuh kill 'variety', / Yuh wi haffi fine a way fi kill / Originality!" The truth is that English is a language that has always relied on dialect and slang, even thrived on it. Ever since the Anglo-Saxons created kennings to both add lyrical color and name things they didn't have words for, English has only known progression through transgression. How else does the creator of this list expect their students to write with any variety, creativity, or, as Bennett puts it, originality.

Lastly, Bennett's point highlights what makes the war on (Black) slang even worse. The very language that's considered informal or slang today, if it catches on enough and gets validation from white folks, usually ends up passing into the common vernacular. Once a single academic decides that the phrase is okay (and not merely acceptable), all the same teachers so up in arms about other people's slang will be using it freely in class.

Bet.