I am black, and have been plundered and have lost my body. But perhaps I too had the capacity for plunder, maybe I would take another human’s body to confirm myself in a community. Perhaps I already had. Hate gives identity. The nigger, the fag, the bitch illuminate the border, illuminate what we ostensibly are not, illuminate the Dream of being white, of being a Man. We name the hated strangers and are thus confirmed in the tribe. But my tribe was shattering and reforming around me. I saw these people often, because they were family to someone whom I loved. Their ordinary moments - answering the door, cooking in the kitchen, dancing to Adina Howard - assaulted me and expanded my notion of the human spectrum. I would sit in the living room of that house, observing their private jokes, one part of me judging them, the other reeling from the changes.

All I then wanted was to write as those black people danced, with control, power, joy, warmth. I was in and out of classes at Howard. I felt that it was time to go, to declare myself a graduate of The Mecca, if not the university. I was publishing music reviews, articles, and essays in the local alternative newspaper, and this meant contact with more human beings. I had editors - more teachers - and these were the first white people I’d ever really known on any personal level. They defied my presumptions - they were afraid neither for me nor of me. Instead they saw in my unruly curiosity and softness something that was to be treasured and harnessed.

When I encounter strangers from my tribes, they are startled by my attempts to communicate. They do not recognize me as one of their own. They laugh, charmed and perhaps a little disturbed by the discrepancy between appearance and sound. When I explain myself, they think me a curious hybrid. They speak to me, always, in English.

I’m a strong believer in the power of language. The way an organization speaks to its various audiences says a lot about how it sees itself. Everywhere I’ve worked I’ve devoted a good deal of personal attention to the organization’s “voice”—to the conversations it maintains with all of its important constituencies, both inside and outside the company. And I have chosen my own words—whether in written, electronic, or face-to-face communications—very carefully.

The truth is, you can learn a great deal about a place simply by listening to how it talks.

FIFTEEN: The Transformer

“Words themselves meant nothing: in isolation, they were arbitrary collections of sounds. The only way to capture their meaning was to draw links between them and other words in the text. So if you had a knowledge graph linking the words “hop,” “green,” “tongue,” “flies,” and “amphibian,” then you knew enough to guess that the word in the center was “frog.” Not only that, but the graph should look the same in German, French, Swahili, or Vietnamese. The word wasn’t the letters “f,” “r,” “o,” and “g”—those letters were just placeholders. The word, in a cognitive sense, was that unique map of links to the rest of the vocabulary.