The Weapon That Didn’t Fire
On Words, Power, Sticks, Stones, and the Boot Behind the Slur
I grew up in Hawaii. White kid. St. Louis School in Honolulu, which was—and remains—a genuinely mixed institution where you learned early that you were not the majority, that your presence was provisional in ways you didn’t fully understand, and that the social physics of the mainland did not apply.
People called me haole. The word means, roughly, foreigner or white person, and in the context of the Hawaiian islands carries a weight that ranges from neutral descriptor to contemptuous dismissal depending on who is saying it, in what tone, to whom, and why. Growing up, I heard it a lot. I also heard it with various modifiers and embellishments that I will leave to the imagination.
It never really landed.
I have thought about this for decades—why the words didn’t do what words are supposed to do, why the insults that were clearly intended to wound produced something closer to mild interest than to injury—and I think I finally have a framework that explains it. It is not a comfortable framework and it cuts against several fashionable positions about language and harm, so let me lay it out carefully.
The word is not the weapon. The power differential behind the word is the weapon. The word is just the delivery mechanism. And when the delivery mechanism is not backed by the power to actually hurt you—institutionally, economically, physically, socially—it doesn’t fire.
Chris Piss and the All-Boys School
My name has been producing comedy since approximately the third grade. Chris Abraham. Abra-ham. Abraham like the patriarch, like the president, like the hang loose in Hawaiian (bra) plus the pig (ham). Abrahamburger. Abra-ham-and-cheese. The piss one is obvious and I will spare you the working-out-of-it.
None of it landed. Not because I was tough, not because I was emotionally armored, not because I had transcended the ego that would allow words to wound. But because the kids saying these things were, at some level I could feel even at six years old, punching with whatever they had because they didn’t have much else.
This is the thing I intuited before I had language for it: when someone of relative powerlessness directs a slur at you, it is a different act than when someone with institutional power behind them does the same thing. The Hawaiian kid calling me haole was fighting with the tools available to him in a context where the historical ledger ran massively against his people. The word was loaded with a particular pain that had nothing to do with me personally and everything to do with what people who looked like me had done to people who looked like him for a hundred and fifty years.
I didn’t take it personally. I wasn’t the target. I was the nearest available representative of the category.
But I also knew—the way you know things at six without being able to articulate them—that a white cop calling a Black man the n-word is a categorically different act from a Black kid calling a white kid haole. Not because one word is worse than the other in some phonemic sense. Because the history is in the word. The institution is in the word. The centuries of murder and dispossession and exclusion are loaded into the syllables like a charge, and the charge fires or doesn’t fire based on who is pulling the trigger and from what position of power.
The boot is in the word.
The Architecture of the Slur
A slur without institutional backing is noise. An insult without power behind it is just rude.
The n-word carries what it carries because it was the word spoken by people who had total power over the people they were speaking it to—people who could be bought and sold, who could be killed without legal consequence, who could be separated from their children, who had no recourse. The word was spoken by judges and sheriffs and employers and landlords. The word preceded lynchings. The word appeared in the deeds of houses that couldn’t be sold to certain people. The word was the audio track of a system of total domination.
When that word is spoken now, it doesn’t come clean. It comes loaded with all of that. The weight is historical, institutional, and cumulative. You cannot separate the sound from the freight.
Dirty Jew carries the same freight. It was spoken by people who had the power of the state behind them, who were processing Jews through bureaucratic systems of dispossession and extermination, who were neighbors and employers and civil servants before they were perpetrators. The word is a vehicle for the history of what it meant when people with that kind of power said it.
When a Hawaiian kid called me haole in the school yard, he didn’t have any of that backing. He had his fists, his pride, his righteous anger at what had happened to his people, and the word. The word landed differently because the delivery system was different. Not better or worse in terms of the person’s dignity or the legitimacy of their grievance. Different in terms of what the word could actually do to me.
This is not an argument that Hawaii is post-racial or that haole doesn’t sting. It does, in context, to people who have been on the receiving end of sustained social exclusion in ways I wasn’t. My particular experience of it was specific to my particular formation. But the point stands as a general principle: words derive their wounding power from the power structure behind them, and that power structure is not equal across different words in different contexts.
The Progressive Inversion
Here is where the framework generates friction with contemporary progressive politics, and I want to be honest about the friction rather than smooth it over.
The architecture of contemporary progressive discourse around language has, in certain ways, inverted this relationship. It has treated all words as having equivalent force regardless of the power differential behind them—has in fact argued that words from people with less institutional power can be more harmful than words from people with more, if the words are directed at marginalized groups.
This produces situations like: a Latino comedian making jokes about his own community is considered less harmful than a white comedian making the same jokes, even if the white comedian has no institutional power over any Latino person and is not deploying the language in a context of domination. The word’s harm is treated as intrinsic to the phoneme rather than as a function of the power structure behind the person speaking it.
I think this gets something importantly backwards. It treats the word as the weapon rather than the boot behind the word as the weapon. It locates harm in the sound rather than in the power relationship. And in doing so, it perversely inflates the power of words spoken by the powerless—grants them a kind of institutional weight they don’t have—while simultaneously treating the words of the powerful as requiring less examination than they should.
The result is a discourse in which the most careful monitoring of language is applied to contexts where language has the least actual power to harm, while the genuinely dangerous uses of language—the language of policy, of law, of institutional authority, of the people who control your housing and your job and your healthcare—receive less scrutiny.
Words matter. They matter in proportion to the power behind them. Collapsing that proportion doesn’t protect the vulnerable. It just makes language policing feel like power when it isn’t.
The Down Syndrome Kid In The Room
There is a character that appears in movies and TV shows periodically—the person with Down syndrome whom everyone around them is trying to mock, condescend to, and manipulate, while being elaborately “kind” to their face. And the joke, when it lands correctly, is that the person with Down syndrome is the only one in the room who is actually fine. They are not wounded by the condescension because they are not organized around the verdict of the people condescending to them. The people performing the mockery are the ones humiliated—by the gap between their cruelty and their performance of kindness, and by the fact that the person they are trying to wound is simply not available to be wounded in the way they intend.
The weapon didn’t fire because the target wasn’t where the shooter expected it to be.
I want to be careful not to appropriate this analogy in a way that’s disrespectful—I am not claiming to have a disability that makes me immune to social cruelty, and I know that people with Down syndrome experience real discrimination and real harm. But the structural point stands: the insult requires a gap between who the target is and who they are performing themselves to be. If there is no gap, the insult has nowhere to land.
Radical Self-Possession As Insult-Proofing
I am 6’3” and 363 pounds. I am morbidly obese by any clinical definition. I wash my hair with Dawn dish soap because it is convenient and I cannot be persuaded that the marginal improvement of actual shampoo justifies the additional cognitive overhead. I have been a curmudgeon since approximately the age of six. I am getting the muted post horn from Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 tattooed on my wrist next week. I am fifty-six years old and the dapper old man I intend to become is still emerging from a body that is currently being negotiated via Ozempic. I want a first-generation Range Rover or a 1997 Land Rover Discovery. I want elbow patches. I want Blundstone boots. I want to be the urban Wellington cowboy who reads Ezra Pound and washes with Dawn and carries a Glock 19 and has the muted horn on his wrist and the WORK tattoo on the web of his right hand.
Nobody calls me fat. Nobody calls me a lard ass. I am not fat-shamed on the internet in any way that registers.
I have thought about why this is. Part of it is probably that I am 6’3” and the social calculus around insulting large people involves some assessment of physical risk. But mostly I think it is because there is no gap between who I am and who I am performing myself to be. There is no wound to find. The insult requires a target that is trying to be something other than what it is, and I stopped trying to be something other than what I am a long time ago.
The fat joke requires the target to be ashamed of being fat. I am not ashamed of being fat. I am aware of being fat and I am working on it via pharmaceutical assistance and I am also washing my hair with Dawn and getting Pynchon tattooed on my wrist and trying to find the right vintage Land Rover, and none of these things require me to not be fat in the meantime. The joke has nowhere to land.
This is what I mean by radical self-possession as insult-proofing. It is not toughness. It is not armor. It is the collapse of the gap that the insult requires to work. When you have fully claimed everything that the insult would name—when there is no version of yourself that the insult is threatening—the weapon doesn’t fire because the target isn’t there.
What Hurt And What Didn’t
I want to be honest that this is not a universal story. I am not claiming that words never hurt anyone and that everyone should just get over it.
I know who the assholes were. I remember them. Not with the vivid autobiographical clarity that most people have—the SDAM makes the specific memories hazy—but I know the categories. The person who tried to use a word to diminish me. The person who tried to deploy condescension as a weapon. The person who thought cruelty was wit.
They didn’t land, mostly. But I also know why they didn’t land for me in particular.
I grew up in Hawaii, which inoculated me against certain specific wounds by giving me a formation in which everyone was a minority of some kind and humor was the shared language rather than a weapon. I have aphantasia, which means I cannot hold a wound in the narrative form that makes it compound over time—the insult lands, gets categorized, and dissipates rather than accumulating into an identity story of victimhood. I am constitutionally inclined toward survivalism as an epistemology—I work with what is actually in front of me rather than with the story of what has been done to me—and that orientation makes me less available to the mechanism by which repeated small wounds become a defining narrative.
None of this is virtue. It is formation and neurology. Other people, with different formations and different neurologies, experience the same words differently. A person who has been systematically excluded, economically marginalized, and socially policed by people who used a specific word to mark them as outside will experience that word differently than I experienced haole in a school yard. This is not because they are weaker. It is because the boot was real in their case and the boot was not real in mine.
The word is still not the weapon. The boot is the weapon. But the boot was there in their case in a way it wasn’t in mine.
Sticks And Stones Was Almost Right
The childhood rhyme says sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me. This is not quite accurate but it is closer to the truth than the opposite position—that words are violence, that speech causes harm equivalent to physical harm, that language is itself an act of power that can damage as thoroughly as any physical weapon.
The more accurate version: sticks and stones will break your bones, and words backed by sticks and stones will also break your bones, and words without sticks and stones behind them will mostly bounce off if you are not organized around the verdict of the person speaking them.
The sticks and stones are the boot. The words are the delivery mechanism. The delivery mechanism without the boot is mostly noise.
This does not mean words don’t matter. It means they matter in proportion to the power behind them. A slur spoken by a powerless person in a school yard is a different thing from the same slur spoken by a judge or a landlord or an employer or a cop. The phoneme is the same. The weapon is different.
Treat the word as the weapon and you spend enormous energy policing phonemes while the boots go unexamined.
Treat the boot as the weapon and you ask who has the power to hurt whom, through what mechanisms, with what institutional backing—and you focus your attention where the actual harm is being produced.
I grew up in Hawaii. I was called haole a lot. I am 363 pounds and nobody fat-shames me. I wash my hair with Dawn dish soap. I am getting the muted horn tattooed on my wrist.
The weapon didn’t fire.
It doesn’t always. It depends on whether the boot is there.
APPENDIX
Context, Notes, and Glossary
Haole
A Hawaiian word (pronounced HOW-lee) that means, literally, “foreign” or “without breath,” though the etymological origin is contested. In contemporary Hawaiian usage it typically means white person or non-native Hawaiian, with a register that ranges from neutral descriptor to contemptuous depending on context, tone, and relationship.
The word carries historical weight in the specific context of the Hawaiian Islands, where the arrival of Western settlers beginning in the late eighteenth century produced a series of catastrophic consequences for Native Hawaiians: introduction of diseases to which they had no immunity, reducing the population from an estimated 300,000 at contact to approximately 40,000 by 1900; the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893 with American military backing; annexation by the United States in 1898; and ongoing displacement from land and political power.
In this context, the word haole carries some of the weight of the history of what people designated by that word did to people designated by other words. A Hawaiian kid calling a white kid haole is not necessarily expressing personal animosity toward that specific white kid—they may be expressing a historically grounded frustration with a category, using the nearest available representative of that category as the vessel.
This is uncomfortable for the white kid in question. It is also different from the way racial slurs function in contexts where the power differential runs in the opposite direction.
The Identified Victim Effect and Word-as-Weapon
The contemporary progressive framework for understanding linguistic harm draws on several academic traditions: critical race theory’s concept of microaggressions, speech act theory’s understanding of performative utterances, and trauma-informed approaches to the psychological effects of derogatory language.
The strongest version of this framework argues that certain words cause measurable psychological harm regardless of context, that the harm is a function of the word’s history and the social category it targets rather than of the specific power relationship between speaker and target in any given instance, and that therefore the appropriate response is to police the word itself rather than to examine the power relationship.
This essay’s counter-argument: the strongest version of this framework produces testable predictions that are not consistently borne out. If words cause harm as a function of the word’s history rather than the power relationship behind the speaker, then a powerless member of a historically marginalized group saying a slur targeting another historically marginalized group should produce equivalent harm to a powerful member of the dominant group saying the same slur. This is not the common-sense experience of most people and it is not what the research consistently shows.
The more defensible version of the framework—that words cause harm in proportion to the power they can mobilize against the target—is actually the version this essay is defending.
Aphantasia, SDAM, and the Wound That Doesn’t Compound
The mechanism by which repeated verbal insults produce lasting psychological harm involves, in part, the narrative process of memory consolidation. A person who is called a slur repeatedly typically experiences those instances as part of a developing story about themselves and their place in the social world—a story that has emotional weight, that is rehearsed through memory, that becomes part of identity.
SDAM (severely deficient autobiographical memory) disrupts this process. If the memories of specific insult instances are not reliably formed and retained, they cannot compound into a narrative of victimhood in the same way. Each instance lands and dissipates rather than accumulating. This is not because the person is tougher or more resilient in any meaningful sense—it is because the storage mechanism that produces cumulative psychological harm is operating differently.
Aphantasia similarly disrupts the mechanism by which a recalled insult can be made vivid and present through mental imagery. Neurotypical people can replay a humiliating encounter with the emotional intensity of a near-live experience. An aphantasic person processes the same memory without the visualizable scenario—as data rather than as relived experience.
The result, in the specific case of the author of this essay, is something that looks like resilience but is probably better described as neurological difference. The wounds that were fired mostly didn’t land, not because of virtue, but because the storage and retrieval system that usually allows them to accumulate was operating differently.
The Muted Post Horn
The muted post horn is a symbol that appears throughout Thomas Pynchon’s 1966 novel The Crying of Lot 49. It is the symbol of Trystero, an underground postal system that may or may not exist, may or may not be a conspiracy, may or may not be a projection of the protagonist’s own paranoia and pattern-seeking.
The symbol is a post horn (a simple brass instrument used historically to signal the arrival of postal coaches) with a mute inside the bell, silencing it. A symbol of communication that cannot sound. A signal without a carrier. A network that operates below the threshold of official notice.
For someone who has aphantasia and SDAM and who operates in the world as a kind of perpetual present-tense without the accumulated narrative that most people carry—the muted post horn is an apt symbol. Communication that cannot fully sound. Signal that travels but doesn’t resolve into the full resonance other people experience.
The author intends to have it tattooed on his wrist. This essay is partly an explanation of why.
WORK
The word WORK tattooed in all caps on the web of the right hand is a reference to the author’s own operating philosophy: the next hill, the next bite of the elephant, the next engagement on its own terms. Not the arc of history bending toward justice. Not the promised land visible from the mountaintop. The immediate present task. Work.
It is also, perhaps, a response to a world that generates enormous quantities of rhetoric about meaning, purpose, justice, arc, and destiny, and in which very little of the work actually gets done because everyone is busy performing their relationship to the arc rather than taking the next hill.
Glossary
The boot — The institutional, economic, physical, or social power behind a word that gives it the capacity to actually harm the target. The word is the delivery mechanism. The boot is the weapon. A slur without the boot is noise. A slur spoken by a cop, a landlord, a judge, an employer, or a person with the physical capacity and social license to follow the word with violence—that is the boot delivering the blow.
Haole — Hawaiian word for foreigner or white person, carrying historical weight proportional to what people of that designation did to Native Hawaiians. Used in this essay as the primary example of a word that carried real historical charge but lacked the boot in the specific context of the author’s school yard experience—not because the history wasn’t real, but because the specific speaker did not have institutional power over the specific target.
Radical self-possession — The condition of having fully claimed everything that an insult would name, eliminating the gap between who you are and who you are performing yourself to be, and thereby removing the target that the insult requires to land. Not toughness or armor—the insult can still make contact. The absence of the wound that the insult is aimed at. You cannot fat-shame someone who isn’t ashamed of being fat.
The gap — The space between who a person is and who they are trying to appear to be, which is the space an insult requires to function. The insult works by threatening to expose the gap—to reveal that you are not what you are performing. When there is no gap, the insult has no leverage. This is why the most heavily armored public performers are often the most vulnerable to specific attacks: the armor reveals the gap.
The Down syndrome room — The structural situation in which everyone around a person is performing cruelty while performing kindness, and the person being targeted is not organized around the verdict of their tormentors and is therefore simply fine, while the tormentors are the ones humiliated by the exposure of their own performance. Used in this essay as an illustration of how radical self-possession removes the target the insult requires.
The word as delivery mechanism — The position that the word itself—the phoneme, the slur, the epithet—is not the weapon but only the vehicle for the actual weapon, which is the power differential and institutional backing of the person speaking it. Treating the word as the weapon rather than the delivery mechanism produces systematic misallocation of attention: enormous energy spent policing phonemes while the boots that give those phonemes their power go unexamined.
SDAM applied to insults — The effect of severely deficient autobiographical memory on the accumulation of psychological harm from repeated verbal insults. If the memory of specific instances is not reliably formed and retained, the instances cannot compound into a narrative of victimhood. Each insult lands and dissipates rather than accumulating. This is not resilience in any meaningful sense—it is neurological difference that produces an outcome that resembles resilience.
Sticks and stones, corrected — The childhood rhyme almost right. Sticks and stones will break your bones. Words backed by sticks and stones will also break your bones. Words without sticks and stones, directed at someone not organized around the verdict of the speaker, will mostly bounce off. The correction restores the power differential to the center of the analysis, where it belongs.
The muted post horn — Symbol from Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. A post horn with a mute in the bell. Communication that cannot fully sound. Signal without full carrier. The author’s chosen tattoo. Make of that what you will.
WORK — The only thing that is actually in front of you, as opposed to the arc, the promised land, the narrative of historical justice bending toward its inevitable conclusion. Tattooed in all caps on the web of the right hand. Hill by hill. Bite by bite. The only epistemology available to someone who cannot see the arc.
Chris Abraham is the founder of Gerris Corp and writes at chrisabraham.substack.com. He grew up in Hawaii. He washes his hair with Dawn. The weapon didn’t fire. He is still not entirely sure why, but he has some theories.