Recently I watched an episode of the Stephen A. Show. Not the \u201cdignified\u201d First Take on ESPN, but his podcast on YouTube where he\u2019s allowed to use the choice words that would more than likely get him fired from his Disney day job.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Anyway, in this particular episode he\u2019s 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\u2019t suspended for his antics in the Clippers\u2019 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\u2019s exactly what it was, an inquiry, not snitching. In fact, he was so insulted by the \u201cS\u201d word he felt compelled to consult that \u201cvaunted\u201d repository of Ebonics Linguistics, the Urban Dictionary. And how did the Urban Dictionary define a snitch? Well, let\u2019s take a quick look at the definition Stephen A. pulled up:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the criminal sense a snitch will provide information to the police or <\/em>feds<\/em><\/a><\/strong> <\/a>in order to obtain <\/em>lenient<\/em><\/strong><\/a> 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 <\/em>informant<\/em><\/strong><\/a> following their arrest.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Now that\u2019s a more clinical definition. One that supports SAS\u2019s position of not being a snitch. However, I would have preferred for him to have included part of the paragraph that followed:<\/p>\n\n\n\n A snitch is one who is <\/em>slanging dope<\/em><\/strong><\/a> 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 <\/em>scott free<\/em><\/strong><\/a> or reduce their own punishment. That is a snitch!<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s the definition I subscribe to. It\u2019s unadulterated and to the point. As I\u2019ve intimated in a previous post, I\u2019m not particularly a Stephen A. fan or defender, but in this instance, I agree with him. He\u2019s not a snitch, just a civilian doing his job. This post is also not about the two Stephen\u2019s, either. I just used them as my introduction to writing about the Scarlett Letter-esque way our communities tend to use the term \u201csnitch\u201d, and more times than not, it’s used to our detriment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For some of us, it\u2019s 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\u2019s what it was called then; tattle-telling. To be clear, tattle-telling wasn\u2019t 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\u2019t 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Of course, I\u2019m 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u2018snitching\u2019 and telling. Snitching is always self-serving. Telling, not always. It\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n 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, \u201cTrue\u201d. But for the purposes of this post, \u2018snitching\u2019 is the label applied to the act of telling. It\u2019s that label that causes civilians like SAS to feel shamed into having to defend the act of simply doing their job. It\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Look, I couldn\u2019t 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 \u2018cigarettes\u2019 in the boy\u2019s bathroom during lunch break, and I turned around and told who gave me the rolled-up \u2018cigarettes,\u2019 Timmy did his job; I\u2019m the one who deserves the beat-down in my Captain America Underoos.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Recently I watched an episode of the Stephen A. Show. 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