SWEAR: ON “GRIT,” ADULT HYPOCRISY, AND PRIVILEGE
I’m gonna cuss on the mic tonight.
“Rockin’ the Suburbs,” Ben FoldsMy parents taught me that if you swear, it’s a sign of a poor vocabulary.
If I expect my players to be disciplined, then I have to be, too.
Dean Smith
Few things have been more important to me than discovering George Carlin during my teens years in the 1970s. Soon to follow was Richard Pryor.
Profanity and the art of crafting humor are easily the foundations for my life of words as avid reader and writer.
And yes, I swear.
But in both Carlin and Pryor I learned something far more important than how to swear in ways that gained me credibility among my peers (despite my frail nerdom); I had the curtain pulled back on adult authority—the hypocrisy of the “do as I say, not as I do” adult world.
Carlin and Pryor were my first critical teachers.
I grew up in a rural Southern town and school system where adults demanded children respect authority and tradition while behaving in ways that were inexcusable—racial slurs, profanity, drinking, smoking, you name it.
This was particularly pronounced among the coaches in the public schools.
Years after I graduated, I returned to that school to teach. A sophomore came into my class one day, stunned that the head football coach/athletic director/assistant principal had just given the student demerits for swearing—and had yelled profanities at the student during the issuing of those demerits.
So as I have noted before about Coach K and my fandom for Duke University basketball, I have a great deal of trouble with the berating, profane coach demanding character and discipline from his/her players—often children, teens, and young adults.
And we live in a world still where a coach launches into a profane tirade to reprimand his player for lacking class and a white, privileged male moralizes cluelessly, perched not on his own morality but his privilege (see Elizabeth Stoker I Swear: On “Grit,” Adult Hypocrisy, and Privilege | the becoming radical: