Once upon a time, when I was a kid getting picked up from basketball practice, I made the mistake of whining to my mom that I was "starving." I couldn't wait to hear what wonderful dinner she had waiting for me at home. What she served up instead was a lecture on how I was not, by any means, starving. Starvation was a devastating reality that affected large portions of the world population, she explained. Just miles away, children my age were suffering from real food insecurity every single day. And, she went on, she hoped that my misappropriating that language to describe a fleeting discomfort was the reflection of a quick lapse in judgment, and not a deeper moral myopia. (At least, that's how I remember it.)
Anyway, my point is that even as a young child, I could understand the idea that words have meaning, and that there is something troubling about distorting those meanings in order to serve your personal reality. Which is why, this week, when coming after Matt Gaetz, I felt my stomach drop.
[Editor's note: This is an excerpt of Code Switch's Up All Night newsletter. You can .]
Gaetz, until recently a Congressman from Florida, has been in the news for days, since . But his short-lived nomination came with turmoil, given that , including a federal sex-trafficking investigation. Gaetz denies the allegations against him. (Before this week, I largely thought of Gaetz as the guy in order to make a point about…why discriminatory policing doesn't matter?)
Given all that, many people, within the government and outside of it, . Ultimately, those critics – the supposed "lynch mob" – won out, and on Thursday, .
To state the painfully obvious: a lynch mob is *not* a group of people calmly raising legitimate concerns about their colleague's alleged ethical and legal violations. In fact, the phrase lynch mob typically evokes who seek to murder and – – who has been scapegoated for a crime they either never committed or got to stand trial for. When most people imagine a lynch mob, .
It's potent imagery, and it's been invoked repeatedly – by everyone from Graham to to . And in many cases, it's an effective way of redirecting energy away from someone in the spotlight. After all, Better to be civil and let history take its course.
But if our country's wealthiest, most powerful white men are the ones being "," and "whipped" – if they're the victims of the "" and "lynch mobs" — what happens when we try to tell the stories of truly victimized people? What words do we have left to describe real injustice? When someone tells us of a true wrong that is taking place in the world, will we even understand what they're talking about? Or will our brains be so skewed at that point that we'll think hunger and starvation are all just variations on a theme.
This was edited by Courtney Stein.
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