Drugs are Racist, M'kay

 

Drugs are Racist, M'kay

– or –

I Went Looking for Racism but All I Found was a Sad Little Cultural Appropriation

© 2021 Ross Williams

I've recently been made aware of yet another 'woke' conspiracism which claims that the word 'marijuana' is racist. Not marijuana itself. The word. Just the word.

My initial reaction to this notion is that its proponents are exhibiting the same cloying desperation of any narcissistic White Messiah who got into the victim savioring business too late to get a legitimate oppression to champion and were thus left to invent one. Or else they're stoned.

In either event, I looked it up.

Apart from the same old boring-the-first-time renditions of puritanical prohibitionists using scare tactics and the heavy cudgel of government power to impose pseudo-moral authoritarianism in the US [which coincided in origin with the ditto over alcohol, for what it's worth] being rebranded as racist when it was nothing more than pseudo-moral authoritarianism, there was nothing in any of the sob sisterings claiming racist etymology of the word that could be found.

Apparently, the word marijuana is racist simply – in a man-as-god spaketh into being manner – because it is. This QED didn't clarify at all my personal dilemma in the matter, deciding whether the folks pushing this notion are inventing monsters under the bed from which to save the world, or whether they're merely 'medicated' into incoherence.

An interesting phenomenon, though, is that easily half of the treatises on The Word Itself is Racist found online contains [usually word for word] the following paragraph:

…“marijuana” didn’t exist as a word in American culture. Rather, “cannabis” was used, most often in reference to medicines and remedies for common household ailments. In the early 1900s, what have now become pharmaceutical giants — Bristol-Meyer’s Squib and Eli Lilly — used to include cannabis and cannabis extracts in their medicines.

This suggests that its adherents are nothing more than C-students who hadn't studied for the exam frantically plagiarizing each other's essays as they utterly fail to answer the question that had been asked: How is the word racist?

I plowed on.

The website devoted to etymological sources was virtually no help apart from containing a lovely snarkism by my personal snark hero.

Dictionary.com was a little more helpful, if only to describe what the word is not. To quote: “the traditional association with the personal name María Juana is probably a folk etymology.” And Mary Janes around the world thank dictionary.com for this.

The English word cannabis is not English at all. It is Latin. The Romans picked up the word [apparently] from the Greeks, who spelled it [in the Roman alphabet] kannabis. The Greeks got it from [or gave it to, no one is certain at this point], variously the Hebrew language [qannabbos, or kanbos], Arabic [kunnab], and/or the Thracian or Scythian languages.

Or possibly the Greeks got it from the Assyrians [qunnappa], who got it from an even-earlier Hebraic origin [qaneh], which derived it from Sanskrit [bhanga], which loaned it to the Persians [bang].

In short, each term that is, or looks like, or sounds like, or resembles a truncated version of [and the horses they respectively rode in on] cannabis is nothing more than the Indo-Iranian language root's term for the thing. The plant. The herb and the 'herb', both. And of course, Indo-Iranian is anthropology-speak for “white”, as in caucasian.

This includes the Slavic [konopi] and the pre-Germanic [*hanapiz, where the “*h” seems to be linguist shorthand for the sound which approximates hocking up phlegm]. This baby-Germanic source seems to be a combination – even if only through wishful thinking – of the Finn-Urgic words kene [hemp] and pis [to burn].

The word hemp is, itself, a thoroughly “white” term. The Finns, as mentioned above: kene, gave it to the rest of the Scandinavians through the thoroughly Germanic habit of consonant-shift as hamp, or hampa. The Germans, being relocated Scandinavians, have hanf. The Dutch: hennep. The English, being dislocated Germans who were constantly ransacked by the pre-German Germans of the Vikings, acquired hemp out of it all.

'Hemp' is, therefore, nothing more than a truncated version of 'cannabis' that had undergone Grimm's Law. And it is completely, totally and irrevocably “white”.

On the other hand, the Mandarin term for the plant and most particularly its flowers is ma hua.

Thousands of Chinese people were more or less forcibly imported as laborers into the west side of the Americas in the late 19^th century, right around the time that the word 'marijuana' emerged. The Chinese laborers were, in social hierarchy of the time and place, inferior to both the American whites and blacks, as well as the next-rung-down Mexicans and Tejanos, or “Texicans”, most of which spoke one version or other of the native language of Mesoamerica: Nahuatl.

It is probably not a coincidence that the Nahuatl word for “manual laborer” is, through varying degrees of mistransliteration and variable dialects, mallihuan, which morphed into mariguan. It is possibly a combination of mallicatl [field laborer] and macohuia [to hire same]. [Many will claim that the Nahuatl word, mallihuan, properly translates to “prisoner”, but the mesoamerican peoples didn't have prisons, per se, and therefore had no use for a term for a person that they didn't know who or what he was. They did capture enemies in battle who were, technically, imprisoned, if temporarily. They were ritually vivisected and were called, in Nahuatl, teomicque.]

Does it really take a rocket scientist to infer the American mishearing of ma hua in close proximity to the mariguan who called it that, thus invented the pseudo-'spanic 'marijuana' out of it all? “Maria Juana” and “Mary Jane” become nothing more than uncleverly coincidental homophonic back-formations.

In order for a term to be racist it must, at a minimum, specifically mock a race. According to the wokesters, only “minorities” [as conceptualized in “the West”] are capable of being racistly mocked. 'Marijuana' as derived from the mariguan's ma hua only mocks the white westerners who couldn't comprehend what they were hearing out of the mouths of the one-degree inferior Mexicans and the Nth-degree inferior Coolie laborers.

If 'marijuana' is indeed racist, it is not racist toward those whom it is stylish to virtue signal on behalf of. It would only be racist to white Americans, and for the purpose of pointing out their cultural pseudo-superiority. “What a bunch of rubes!! They hear ma hua and they pronounce it mari-wanna!! Hahahahahaha!!”

What the wokesters demand be used in the place of 'marijuana'...? 'Cannabis'. A whiter term could not be found.

'Marijuana', as a word, is derived of an ethnic language. Two, actually. Granted, it is derived of a wholly misinterpreted hearing of those ethnic languages, but derived it nonetheless is. At best it becomes a white bastardization of a white misinterpretation of ethnic sources. There's nothing racist – in contemporary usage of the term “racist” – about it. It is a very tepid, bland and [if you'll pardon the white-washing] vanilla example of cultural appropriation.

In the end, I've learned a lot in this research exercise. I've learned much specific etymology. But more to my personal dilemma, I've learned that the pseudo-pious still insist on saving the world from goblins invented completely in the minds of the pseudo-pious. And I've learned that many people are too stoned to be able to answer the questions they were asked.