I dislike that term. It negates the emotion of whoever is being spoken to. It negates the fact that obviously, this other person sees the speaker as a human being. Context is important too though. It depends on how it’s said and why. I’ve heard it primarily in dialogues on race and racism. This is primarily because these are the spaces where I’m looking out for it the most. In other spaces – times when we are discussing-isms that I enact (heterosexism, genderism, ableism, classism, etc.) – it is me who is either saying it, or playing it out in how I essentially shut out the person who is making me feel this way.

But I am a person.

While this term annoys me to some extent, it also exhilarates and saddens me at the same time. It clarifies for me why I am bothered with the word “but” so much. This word captures the essence of the dichotomy many people socialized in the United States fall into. It is the idea of right and wrong, good and bad, negative and positive, hurtful and affirming, as if these ideas cannot exist at once or in a way in which the line between them either blurs or disappears. For example, if I call a white person racist and they say, “But I’m a person,” this is what goes through my mind.

At first I am angered. I grow furious that once again, someone is trying to pull themselves out of a situation in which they have hurt me, therefore negating their accountability in that hurt. In four words, they seek to do away with my emotions, with me, concentrating in tunnel vision on their intentions and not on how it manifested into whatever space we’re talking about. I want to grab them and scream into them the history of whites that have wiped the Island of Quesqueya (Haiti and the Dominican Republic) clean of Tainos. I want to convey to them in the loudest way the severity and urgency of racism.

I want them to own the numbness they feel when faced with inequitable imprisonment rates, death rates, medical discrimination and malpractice rates, heart disease rates, suicide rates, economic mobility rates, housing rates and the consistent upholding of colonial ideals and values shown clearly in cases such as the millions movies. Films such as “Avatar” and “The Blind Side” make the sick certainty that few white people (and people of color) saw or took time to reflect on the blatant racism and sexism and ableism those movies profess (especially Avatar-racism in poor natives needing to be saved by the Great Whites, ableism in the act of running being so exhilarating and irresistible when faced with going back to a wheelchair and my sexism in not being able to articulate the sexism I saw in the film, heterosexism in the privileging and normalizing of hetero relationships, etc,).

I wanted to show them that neutrality is impossible here. We’re all connected and neutrality is an excuse used to throw dirt over those connections, over the constant ways we continually harm and negate each other.

And so then I am also confused. I think, “What have I said that negates my obvious viewing of this individual as a person?” I wonder what was lost and how deep my wanting to dehumanize this individual runs. Do I hate this person? Is my hatred seeping through my words, through how I am relating? What am I saying and where is it coming from? Where am I coming from and to what end am I going? Am I preparing for war or peace with this person? Trying to work in that dichotomy of hate vs. love is like digging my own grave.

There’s no room for ambiguity and seeing how every individual is complex beyond words. This negation of ambiguity therefore negates me, and prevents me from connecting immediately to whatever emotions this speaker is feeling. The “but” is like a drawbridge ripped up, leaving me faced with a wall and an ocean beneath it.

And then I feel love, knowing that the reaction to being seen as a racist is a reaction founded in a wanting to not be that way, to not have hurt me in that way. I see hope and possibility in how this person somehow almost subconsciously differentiates between being a racist and practicing racism and being a full feeling human being. I see hope there, because at that point I know we’re talking about the same thing. We’re talking about something that shouldn’t exist, that no one should hold or enact. We’re talking about something genocidal, something unacceptable, something horrible and murderous. This person, usually a white person, who says, “but I’m a person,” also says, “but racism is inhuman.”

Still, that “but,” while bringing us closer, also pushes us away from owning our actions in that space and in our lives and how we speak and live in the world. What would it mean for white folks to say, “What I did and how I live is racist and I’m a person.” What would that mean and implicate? Might this be why it’s avoided?

And what does that space look like? I’ll use myself. I am a sexist and a human being.

While I dehumanize and objectify women without even thinking about it, that sexism also exists with a deep sadness and disgust that I still act in this way, a sadness and disgust that translates into acting and thinking differently (I’m working on it).

When you speak or disagree with others, do you use “but”, or “and?”

Will Syldor is a Collegian columnist. He can be reached at [email protected].