It\u2019s not that he denies talking; he just doesn\u2019t think of it as trash<\/em>. Todd Boyd would agree with this sentiment. As the University of Southern California professor and chair for the study of race and popular culture explains, \u201cI mean, talking trash\u2014it sounds disposable. The metaphor is disposable.\u201d<\/p>\n Says Sapp, \u201cCall it the dozens. Or call it shit talking. That\u2019s all it is.\u201d<\/p>\n As a kid, Sapp learned to engage in verbal combat both at home, where he was the youngest of six siblings, and in the neighborhood, where he would pedal the bike he asked his mom for every December\u2014as either a birthday or Christmas gift\u2014to wherever his friends were hanging out, where he knew they\u2019d be talking shit. \u201cThat was our entertainment. That was our fun,\u201d he says. \u201cWhen we got together, we talked about each other.\u201d<\/p>\n According to the activist H. Rap Brown, who changed his name to Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, the dozens served as linguistic training for many Black youth, too. As he writes in his 1969 memoir: \u201cHell, we exercised our minds by playing the Dozens.\u201dAnd: \u201cWe played the Dozens for recreation, like white folks played Scrabble.\u201d<\/p>\n If you didn\u2019t grow up with it, perhaps the easiest way to understand the dozens is to think about the game as the exchange of your-mama jokes\u2014combatants trying to one-up (and even upset) each other, while vying for verbal and creative supremacy via any vulgar means necessary. Usually, this would transpire before an inciting crowd of observers who served to heighten the accolades of success and deepen the humiliation of defeat. But the dozens isn\u2019t so easily defined\u2014neither in format nor content.<\/p>\n According to some accounts, the dozens can be traced to the early days of the United States, when it was played by enslaved people, while Elijah Wald, in his deeply academic book on the subject, Talking \u2019Bout Your<\/em> Mama: The Dozens, Snaps, and the Deep Roots of Rap<\/em>, makes the case that the game has African roots.<\/p>\n As an informal pastime played in schoolyards, on front stoops, and in barrooms, the dozens can claim no unifying theory. It\u2019s always evolving, defined by its participants, informed by context, and infused with local flavor. For many, the dozens is known by other names\u2014like joning, slipping, capping, bagging, or snapping\u2014and individual experiences with the game can be equally varied.<\/p>\n For some, like Sapp, the dozens is an activity undergirded by affection and bonhomie. It is a prosocial endeavor\u2014a bonding ritual\u2014even if there are a few sharp edges. As Steve Jones Jr., the basketball coach and son of ABA star Steve Jones, describes it to me, talking shit was his dad\u2019s \u201clove language.\u201d Todd Boyd can relate.<\/p>\n \u201cMy parents talked shit, like regularly. Like every day. It doesn\u2019t get any closer than that,\u201d he says. \u201cAfter a while, that\u2019s the normal mode of discourse. That\u2019s how Black people talk. Black people I grew up around, anyway.\u201d This dynamic would speak to what are known as \u201cjoking relationships,\u201d which were defined by the pioneering social anthropologist Alfred R. Radcliffe-Brown as consisting of \u201ca peculiar combination of friendliness and antagonism,\u201d in which intimacy can masquerade as hostility. In which, in other words, insults aren\u2019t to be taken personally.<\/p>\nSome, for example, have cast the game as a means of negotiating social status, a puberty or initiation ritual, an in-group signifier, or a mechanism of survival. These all speak to a kind of testing\u2014a challenge being presented.<\/span>\n But just as play fighting can become the real thing, the dozens can be a dangerous game: sometimes people get hurt. \u201cIt is a risky pleasure,\u201d as Zora Neale Hurston put it. In 1939, the white American psychologist and sociologist John Dollard was the first person to give the dozens serious academic attention in his paper \u201cThe Dozens: Dialect of Insult.\u201d He noted that \u201cthe themes about which joking is allowed seem to be those most condemned by our social order in other contexts.\u201d<\/p>\n Dollard saw the game not just as idle entertainment, but also as serving a utilitarian function for Black folks living in an openly racist society, specifically as \u201ca valve for aggression\u201d that would have otherwise and rightly been directed at white people, which would also have likely led to violent consequence.<\/p>\n Various other ideas and theories about the functionality of the dozens have emerged over the years, though Wald asserts that \u201call are interesting as much for what they reveal about the explainers as what they tell us about the game.\u201d But while there may be no authoritative account\u2014and while the meaning of the game to one person can be in direct contradiction with what it means to another\u2014the explanations are instructive.<\/p>\n Some, for example, have cast the game as a means of negotiating social status, a puberty or initiation ritual, an in-group signifier, or a mechanism of survival. These all speak to a kind of testing\u2014a challenge being presented.<\/p>\n This last functionality, in particular, has gained traction with many. In 1970, the psychologist Joseph White writes in Ebony <\/em>\u201cthat the brothers and sisters use the dozens as a game to teach them how to keep cool and think fast under pressure.\u201d<\/p>\n The following year, in their book The Jesus Bag<\/em>, psychiatrists William H. Grier and Price M. Cobbs describe the dozens as \u201ca highly evolved instrument of survival\u201d that introduces Black youth \u201cto the humiliations which will become so intimate a part of their life.\u201d They write, \u201cIn the deepest sense, the essence of the dozens lies not in the insults but in the response of the victim.\u201d<\/p>\n Nigerian poet, scholar, and journalist Onwuchekwa Jemie\u2014who links the dozens to similar West African traditions\u2014describes this learned stoicism as a kind of immunization process: \u201cIt is as if the system is inoculated with virtual (verbally imagined) strains of the virus.\u201d<\/p>\n But to gain true inoculation, one\u2019s immune response has to be put to the test. And in that sense, the goal of the game is to not just best an opponent, but to get them to lose their cool. It\u2019s why H. Rap Brown described the dozens as \u201ca mean game,\u201d wherein \u201cwhat you try to do is totally destroy somebody else with words.\u201d He continued: \u201cThe real aim of the Dozens was to get a dude so mad that he\u2019d cry or get mad enough to fight.\u201d<\/p>\n As Dollard writes in 1939, \u201cit is good technique to attack the other fellow at his weak point, if that be found\u201d and that \u201cthe one who fights first tends to be viewed as the \u2018weaker kidder.\u2019\u201d Warren Sapp can barely imagine his childhood duels devolving into fisticuffs: \u201cNo, you throw a punch and nobody is going to hang out with you. You soft-skinned bastard.\u201d<\/p>\n And yet violence was always a possible outcome with the dozens. Any insult contains an implicit and necessary threat, a violation\u2014it\u2019s what gives the insult its power\u2014and if you\u2019re going to disparage someone, especially by \u201cgetting close to dangerous truths in comical ways,\u201d as Wald puts it, that invites retaliation, verbal or otherwise.<\/p>\n But even more than that, the dozens could be deployed at times with the explicit intention to hurt or to escalate an encounter to physical conflict. That distinction may not always be clear. As Jemie writes, the dozens is \u201calways ambiguous and double edged. Always, it could be used either to amuse or abuse.\u201d Many who understood the dozens for its bloody potential felt it was best avoided altogether, per Wald. At least one Mississippi establishment even hung a sign to that effect in the late 1920s: If you want to play the dozens, go home.<\/em><\/p>\n Others opted out simply because they didn\u2019t want to get their feelings hurt.<\/p>\n Soft-skinned bastards.<\/p>\n _____________________________________________<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/trash-talk-193x300.png\")
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