Sticks 'N' Stones...

We used to call them cripples, retards, niggers/kaffirs, broads and faggots, and thought nothing of it. When they complained, when they protested, when they offered us more benign, less pejorative terms to use, we scoffed. “Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words can never hurt you!” we would say, blaming them for feeling the pain our words inflicted. We could not, after all, change our words, our tones, our voices, for to do so would be to admit we were wrong, and we, the right, cannot be wrong!

We limited their rights based on their colour, their gender, their race and disability, preventing some from voting, others from earning an equal wage, still others from becoming parents…but we inferred no wrong in our beliefs and actions because we, of course, knew better than they. We had the education, the intelligence, the cultural and social awareness, to make these edicts and so one had to be white, fully-abled, and preferably male in order to be a fully enfranchised citizen. Amazingly, a large portion of women, people of colour and the disabled bought into this biased and unbalanced way of thinking, willingly subordinating themselves to the self-selected elite because, after all, they must bear their defects with proper humility and never aspire above their stations.

But one day in America a small black woman, tired after a full day of work, refused to keep the status quo. The law in her community dictated that she sit in the back of the bus (the front being reserved for white people), and if the bus was full, black people were to give up their seats to the whites.