BLACK HISTORY MONTH Post in March: What’s Grammar Got To Do With Slavery?

As I watched the movie “12 Years a Slave” gain critical acclaim and garner awards, I couldn’t help but cringe every time I heard the name of the movie. 

Sometimes, American English is tricky: The verb “to be,” conjugated as “is a slave” in the present tense, or “was a slave” in the past tense, often unintentionally suggests identity.  Resultantly, every time we say that someone was a “slave,” which by definition is “a person who is the chattel or property of another,” we unintentionally accept and promote the identity that was assigned to countless people by money-hungry oppressors who liked to refer to themselves as “masters.” 

My hope, as we continue to look at this part of American history in film and other mediums, is that we change our language so that it more clearly reflects what actually happened.  Would we refer to those who were shackled and stripped of language, identity and humanity as “those who were enslaved,” or “those who were told that they were slaves,” or “those who were treated like property” versus “slaves.”  Although “those who enslaved them” would like for us to believe that they were “slaves”—property with identity or worth outside of their ability to work and breed—our language doesn’t need to support that idea.  It can and should speak against it.

*Note: Please excuse any unintentionally ironic grammatical errors, as I had neither the patience nor the energy to perfect this post.  In fact, it’s been sitting incomplete on my laptop for more than a week, and today I decided to just get it done.

Our Beloved Gary

He won his way into our hearts with his chubby cheeks, cute face, and charismatic, "Whatchoo talkin' 'bout, Willis?" I still remember the episode where he asked Willis to hang him on the pole in their bedroom closet so that he could grow a few more inches.

For eight years, actor Gary Coleman brought laughter into our homes each week as little Arnold Jackson on TV’s "Diff'rent Strokes."  On May 28, 2010, at the age of 42, Coleman passed away. On the surface, his life story reads like the script of a B-level movie, replete with the predictable child-star-gone-bad plot. But in this script, there’s a twist.

Like many child stars, Coleman struggled with his parents over money. He wanted to control it. They wanted to control it. They fought. They became estranged.  And like many child stars (and some adult stars), Coleman felt trapped in the shadow of the TV character that made propelled him to fame. Decades of hearing fans yell out “Hey, Arnold!” or "Whatchoo talkin' 'bout, Willis?" kept Coleman in the past, never-ending reminders that to many people, he was a fictitious character who existed only in the past, with no present life and no future.

But unlike many child stars, the trait that catapulted him to fame is the trait that blocked continued fame. Yes, other child stars had to shed their cuteness and youthful personas to establish themselves as legitimate adult actors. (Drew Barrymore and Ricky Rick Schroeder are two examples.) But none of them had to overcome a persona resulting from a disease.

Coleman’s 4’8” frame resulted from a congenial kidney disease. And while it enabled him to play the role of child Arnold Jackson for several years without any “inconvenient” growth spurts, it’s his seemingly perennial youth that prevented us from seeing that like us, he too was aging, maturing. 


The show’s eight successful seasons and its years in syndication cemented him in our minds as our little Arnold. His body was ours to hug, his cheeks ours to pinch, and his being ours to photograph, at will. Perhaps this is what abraded Coleman the most—not just that he wasn’t allowed to have his own identity—but that he wasn’t allowed to be a man, the one that he had grown into once the cameras stopped rolling.

Meeting Faith: The Forest Journals of a Black Buddhist Nun

Hungry for a good read? Meeting Faith is two hundred eighty-one pages of deliciousness you don’t want to pass up. I now know why the book won the 2005 PEN Beyond Margins Award for Best Memoir and received an enthusiastic thumbs up from O Magazine. In it, the author does what good writers should: She takes me on a journey, shows me something beautiful, and makes me not want to come back.

Meeting Faith details the period of time in which the author, Faith, on the verge of flunking out of college, takes some “time off” from school. But unlike most students, who travel to Paris or Italy, backpacks in tow, Faith Adiele travels to the Far East—to the remote areas of Thailand. A self-declared sociologist, she jumps head first (and hairless might I add) into a Thai wat seeking to understand Buddhism and women’s roles in the religion. (Are you sensing her ardent commitment?) She exchanges comfort, pleasure, and daily communication for a commitment to refrain from entertainment, touching money, all forms of entertainment, sleeping on soft surfaces, and consuming food at inappropriate times, which is most of the time. Sound fun?

The reader follows Faith as she attempts to live by seemingly impossible rules (You try not killing a single bug while living in a forest!), watching her comical failures and her thrilling successes. Pushed by her teacher, Maechi Roongduan, she progresses, so that what once seemed impossible for Faith’s mind and body becomes customary.

Fusing together journal entries, detailed sociologist’s notes, classic Buddhist texts, and childhood memories, Faith weaves together a tale of her time with a group of Thailand’s maechi (Buddhist nuns) that is educational, yet extremely personal. Faith learns that while studying them, she must examine herself, and in discovering their faith, she must uncover her own as well.

Yes, this book is about faith, but it is just as much about identity—what defines us—what drives us. And whether you are a person of faith or one who is searching, I would definitely recommend meeting Faith because she writes with an honesty that is refreshing and challenging. With bravery and beauty, she bares her being:

“…The surprising decision to ordain and what I learned during my short, short tenure as a nun revised the very premises of my life. I’d been raised to believe in myself, in intellect, in the Western tenets of self and science, and I’d taught myself not to fail. Soon everything I knew and counted on would be stripped away. As it turned out, failure was the first step toward real life.”