Faithful readers know (and should be able to predict) what this post is going to assert. To them, I say, “Thank you for paying attention.”

To the rest of you, please pay close attention.

We’re all watching with amazement as Black preachers lead the way in calling Charlie Kirk a racist. The particular phrase these men use to defend their claim is in my title.

Now, every good little literate “whitey” knows how to call up the full conversation/debate from which the phrase came and determine for themselves the context within which Kirk uttered his assessment. That’s step 1.

Step 2 for those of us who were pretty sure Kirk was not a racist, but have been wrong before and so wanted to check for ourselves, is felt utter confusion (not me, mind you) at how even our “black friends” are siding with these ignorant preachers instead of the plain meaning of the English language.

Here’s what is going on. There is no need to be confused.

Bluntly: Some Blacks (maybe most) still believe in incantation. Incantation, recall, is context free.

To flesh this out a bit, let’s review what incantation is all about. In short, the phrase “abra cadabra” (that we all know from some Disney movie we all watched years ago) is a phrase that we, as children, used to magically turn objects into other objects. Or the like. For us, it was a game. We usually had a wand or our finger cocked in a special way as we said it. “Abra cadabra, and POOF!, you’re unfrozen.” Sometimes it was in finding oneself holding what appeared as a wand which caused our utterance of the phrase. Like we’re in a gift shop, see a stick with a star at one end and suddenly are inspired to grab it and tap our unwitting friend on the head and say, “Abra Cadabra, you pay for Starbucks after we’re done here.”

What were we doing? We were playfully using what people in antiquity seriously used, that is, we were incanting. Even as children we knew it wasn’t merely the phrase but the specific sounds, the way we said the phrase, that mattered. In fact, this feature of incantation often explained why the change didn’t happen. “You didn’t say it right!” we would explain. Again, as children, we knew that you couldn’t achieve the intended result by an all business-like or all medical-assessment-like utterance of the phrase. No. It had to be said a certain way. Plainly, it had to be uttered intoned with belief.

The point here is that we (the confused, literate whites) don’t believe incantation works now that we’re adults.

But many Blacks, of all ages, do.

And that is how even your “black friends” do not budge when they are shown the full context of Kirk’s remarks.

For many Blacks, there is a distinct evil associated with such a phrase (“black women do not have the brain processing power”). The context doesn’t matter any more than it does for abra cadabra.

By way of another example, Shakespeare’s “Double, Double Toil and Trouble” comes to mind as something similar in Western culture. Did the witches’ prophecy actually cause MacBeth’s troubles? No. Now, it’s true that there was a coincidence, but this is merely a cerebrally fun feature of great storytelling. On the whole, though, while we servants of the West would never think twice about saying, “Double, Double, Toil and Trouble”, our Black neighbors (keep in mind they also don’t know Shakespeare—and this is not coincidence) believe there are certain things you just don’t say. Again, this is not because of the meaning’s of the words, it is because of an exceedingly old school (Old Testament and older) belief in how human speech works vis-à-vis the invisible world.

Please don’t let the NSFW part of my claim cause you to miss the actual significance of my claim. You are now no longer confused why many Blacks don’t care about context. But this clarity does not reveal the solution to the larger problem that still remains: Many Blacks don’t care about context.

What can be done?

I have no idea.