“It’s My Body and Pll Show It If I Want To”_____53
make it a term of inclusion, and if so what exactly are we
including ourselves in? (185)
She continues:
[Jesse Jackson] came out and called New York "Hymie-town”
and people were ready to light him on fire. .. Hymie-town
should not have been an insult, because there is no Hymietown. Maybe there’s Hymie Smith, you know, but there’s no
Hymie-town. (190, 191)
These vignettes are surprising. It seems for Goldberg names have no
history or power in their invocation. Yet Goldberg obviously recognizes the
efficacy of words, and Book is a testament to the comedienne’s recognition. The
written word is efficacious, and Goldberg’s invocation of Hester Prynne’s
punishment in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic The Scarlet Letter bears evidence
of Goldberg’s understanding of the harmful impact of labeling, branding, and
naming. As critics Ferdinand M. De Leon and Sally MacDonald claim, "[t]he
labels we use affect how others perceive us and how we see ourselves; they are
used by those in power to define the rest even as they struggle to define
themselves” (65). Correspondingly, Maya Angelou poignantly chronicles the
distaste Black people have in being called anything other than their given
names. A White employer with a lazy tongue regarded Angelou’s name too
difficult to pronounce and cavalierly assigned her another name. Angelou
retorts, "[e]very person I knew had a hellish horror of being ‘called out of his
name.’ It was a dangerous practice to call a Negro anything that could be loosely
construed as insulting because of the centuries of their having been called
niggers, jigs, dinges, blackbirds, crows, boots and spooks” (23). In other words,
labels like “nigger,” "hymie,” "spic,” and "kike” come charged with history.
Certainly Goldberg’s celebrity status affords her the luxury to disregard
these words, but I hesitate to conclude she ife so insensitive as to want to disavow
their harmful effects. Given the complexity of her work and what we know
about her career, it seems unlikely that she would be oblivious to her situation
and to the power of her words. One of the criticisms of "political correctness”—
do not utter "nigger” but say "the ‘n’ word” instead—is that it does not solve the
problem of racial hatred but merely creates more hypocrisy and secrecy (i.e., a
person does not speak the word but still thinks it). I think Goldberg asks,
"Which is better?” Maybe—just maybe—we are better off knowing that Jesse
has a problem with Jews or that Furman and many other White Los Angeles
cops hate Black people. Maybe she is saying we would all have fewer intestinal
problems if we could fart in public. Maybe she suggests that we express our
prejudices so that they can be addressed and answered. By invoking the Puritans
in America ("In the Puritan days, we dragged adulterers into the streets and put
’em in the stockades and posted a big old sign next to them describing their
crime: FOR UNLAWFUL CARNAL KNOWLEDGE” [183]), Goldberg
reminds America of the violence that has occurred in our nation’s history