Someone once told me that if I used curse words, it would make other people think that I was uneducated and uncultured. Therefore, I should try as hard as I can to avoid them whenever possible.

More than that, they claimed that I seemed "more black" when I swore.

Over the past six years, I've written dozens upon dozens of poems, essays, letters, short stories and even a play and narration on the subject. I will argue vehemently that the best of them contain vulgarity.

I'm not uneducated. I'm not uncultured, and I'm no more or less black than I ever was. I just have a deep and abiding love for swearing as part of the English language.

Let's think about this sentiment for just a second: you sound "more black" when you swear. Since this proceeds "swearing will make others think you're uneducated and uncultured," there are some clear elitist undertones here. Ones that date back hundreds of years, roughly to the Norman Conquest. After the invasion of William, Duke of Normandy, England became a two-tiered society, in which the lower class learned what we now refer to as Old German. The upper-class learned what we now refer to as Old French. This led to the creation of vulgar language, since so many of the swear words we know and love stem from colloquial farmer terms that have Germanic roots. This is why it's somewhat easier to identify common German words than it is common French words. For example, Mother or Mutter vs Mère.

It's actually kind of cool if you completely ignore the fact that the separation of Romance and Germanic language is just one of many methods of class division.

It's also somewhat ironic. English is not the purist of languages, bursting forth from the heavens on a golden chariot to show all the way of righteousness, which, although I exaggerate somewhat, many Americans have made it out to be. What the English language owns today, it stole. We stole from Latin, Spanish, Greek, Arabic, Hindi (yes, we stole from brown people, big surprise), German, French and hundreds more stretching back so far that we may never be able to accurately map every single root language. Why do Americans in particular praise it as the ubermensch of tongues, when so much of it derives from what was considered the lowest of language?

I know that it's something of an obvious question, but why is vulgarity almost immediately associated with the fact that I'm black? I mean, comeon.

Look, the separation of curse words from what's considered acceptable language is ridiculous. The concept of vulgarity in speech is ridiculous. Look at the word vulgar, it literally means of the crowd. Of the people. Cursing, like it or not, is derived from the speech of the masses. It is concise, colloquial, and has a place in the English language and deserves to be used with knowledge and care.

Don't let yourself be fooled into thinking that cursing makes you less cultured, less mature, or uneducated. It's not the same now as it was immediately following the Norman conquest, but the division of language is one method of separation in the world that we certainly don't need.

Screw the taboo of colloquialism. Screw the shunning of Germanic curses. Screw the overly condensed teaching of the English language that we continue to force on generation after generation. Like anything that has lasted thousands of years, English will evolve. It will be exposed to people who will change it, it will soak up the color of the time. It will be given new names, introduced to other tongues, broken up and divided, scattered, and it will come back a new language.

So while we have our current English language, seek to understand and use all of it. Even the bad parts.