Recently I watched an episode of the Stephen A. Show. Not the “dignified” First Take on ESPN, but his podcast on YouTube where he’s allowed to use the choice words that would more than likely get him fired from his Disney day job.
Anyway, in this particular episode he’s going off on Stack (Stephen Jackson, known for his more infamous role in the Malice-in-the-Palace incident. Yeah, that dude), for labeling him a snitch. Why two grown men in their fifties would even care about the snitch label is beyond me; however, it now has another guy in his fifties (me) writing about it. Apparently, Stack (and some others) had an issue with SAS for calling the league office to inquire on why Russell Westbrook wasn’t suspended for his antics in the Clippers’ Game 3 loss to the Mavericks in their first-round playoff series. As Stephen A. tells it, in the process of conducting his day-job, that’s exactly what it was, an inquiry, not snitching. In fact, he was so insulted by the “S” word he felt compelled to consult that “vaunted” repository of Ebonics Linguistics, the Urban Dictionary. And how did the Urban Dictionary define a snitch? Well, let’s take a quick look at the definition Stephen A. pulled up:
In the criminal sense a snitch will provide information to the police or feds in order to obtain lenient treatment for themselves and provide information over an extended period of time in return for money or for police to overlook their own criminal activities. Quite often someone will become an informant following their arrest.
Now that’s a more clinical definition. One that supports SAS’s position of not being a snitch. However, I would have preferred for him to have included part of the paragraph that followed:
A snitch is one who is slanging dope or doing some other wrong doing, and gets caught, but instead of taking their punishment like a man they tell the authorities info on other criminals so they can get off scott free or reduce their own punishment. That is a snitch!
That’s the definition I subscribe to. It’s unadulterated and to the point. As I’ve intimated in a previous post, I’m not particularly a Stephen A. fan or defender, but in this instance, I agree with him. He’s not a snitch, just a civilian doing his job. This post is also not about the two Stephen’s, either. I just used them as my introduction to writing about the Scarlett Letter-esque way our communities tend to use the term “snitch”, and more times than not, it’s used to our detriment.
For some of us, it’s been embedded since childhood. You know the routine. It was the beating you got for doing something wrong, or the pop you got for being a tattletale. Yes, that’s what it was called then; tattle-telling. To be clear, tattle-telling wasn’t snitching. It just meant you were the sibling who got popped for not keeping your mouth shut. Talk about a childhood conundrum. If you saw something and didn’t say something and it was later found out you saw something, you got popped. If you saw something and said something, guess what? You got popped. Oh, and on top of that, treated as a pariah by your siblings, cousins, friends, aunts, uncles, mail carriers, etc. Pretty much by anybody who may have held a secret and knew you couldn’t hold water. That, in my opinion, laid some of the subconscious foundation for us to turn a blind eye to the negative things that went on, and continue to go on in our neighborhoods, organizations, and households to this day.
Of course, I’m generalizing here. Not every tattletale got punished; some were rewarded by the responsible adults in the room. Those who knew that to keep some semblance of order in a household you needed allies behind the lines willing to sacrifice a late-night beat-down in their Captain America Underoos, quietly beneath a Spider-Man blanket. I now admit to administering a few of those beat-downs. So, as you can tell, I remember vividly what was worn and by whom. But seriously, it was those responsible adults who taught integrity, morals, and leadership to the little boys and girls willing to stand on doing the right thing, and risk being ostracized by siblings, cousins, and friends in the pursuit of doing so.
When you grow up believing that bearing witness to a wrong is in itself wrong, it could tend to have the negative effect of holding decent communities and organizations hostage to those who blur the difference between ‘snitching’ and telling. Snitching is always self-serving. Telling, not always. It’s all in the intent of the action and the role played by the teller. Sure, one could argue telling could also come with self-serving benefits. However, if the self-serving benefit is removing the troubling elements from your neighborhood so that your son, daughter, wife, mother can walk down the street in relative safety, then that benefits an entire community, not just the individual doing the telling. And again, the individual doing the telling is not part of the troublesome element.
Now, I know some reading this will argue semantics on how snitching and telling are essentially the same thing and can be used interchangeably. And to that I say, “True”. But for the purposes of this post, ‘snitching’ is the label applied to the act of telling. It’s that label that causes civilians like SAS to feel shamed into having to defend the act of simply doing their job. It’s that label that grips the truth by the throat and silences a whole congregation from acknowledging the amazing happenstance of three different kids, born three months apart looking like Pastor. It’s the label that hides behind a blue wall, intimidating good officers into foregoing their oath to protect and serve the community. The label runs the gamut of our society, often applied by those who look to control the narrative of their own indiscretions utilizing it to guilt-trip the truth.
Look, I couldn’t stand the hall monitor either. But I also knew Timmy with the bad haircut had a job to do, and it was incumbent on me not to do anything nefarious in front of him. So if Timmy told on me for smoking rolled-up ‘cigarettes’ in the boy’s bathroom during lunch break, and I turned around and told who gave me the rolled-up ‘cigarettes,’ Timmy did his job; I’m the one who deserves the beat-down in my Captain America Underoos.
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