Trigger Warning: Sexual Assault, Suicide, Prison

Man, do I consider myself inexorably --I may or may not spend the entirety of this post poking fun at Orwell's rules-- lucky to be able to write about language. I was just conferring with my mentor about the way that I speak about oppression and how it varies depending who I talk to. For example, if I am talking to a white male who is agreeing with me in my disgust of the horrendously autocratic society in which we live, I will refer to the oppressors as "they". Conversely, if I am talking to a white male who disagrees  (for instance one who brings a cardboard cut out of Ronald Reagan to the Flood Wall Street demonstration and proselytizes to the protesters) I will refer to the oppressors as "you". Meaning them. This is something I may have done intentionally at one point in the past but now it is so natural that I won't notice unless its brought to my attention. See also: replacing "survivor" with "victim" and "convict" with "criminalized person" or "prisoner" with "incarcerated person". Orwell's rules give me little space to define why I chose to say "empowered" and so I am leaving Professor Waterson with an entirely different thought than I had intended to provoke.
I find my language changing based on my experiences and the peers I surround myself with who are always revealing to me the implications of the words and phrases I use. I quickly adapted to never joking about shooting myself/cutting myself/ending everything because I became friends with a girl who had all too recently found her brother hanging from a ceiling fan. Never in any of the times that I had lamented my struggles and casually pointed a gun shaped hand sign to my head had I ever thought of the seriousness of what I had implied and how that might effect those around my struggling with suicidal thoughts or who knew someone that had taken their own life. For them, the motion had an entirely different meaning.
I never knew how terrible the word "victim" was until society gave me that label. I will never call myself a victim of domestic assault-- I am not a victim, I am a survivor and so is anyone else who has been raped, abused or otherwise suffered terrible conditions. We are not weak, and if you do not know what it is like to have these experiences you cannot possibly understand the way it feels to be called a victim, as if there was nothing you could have done and nothing you can do now, you are weak and powerless.
I think many of us know the stories of mass incarceration all too well based on our placements and the simple fact that we all attend John Jay College, so I will not go much further into that because I do have more to say about other things (there is always more).
Our language connects our soul to other people, when we exchange words we exchange our principles, our ideals, our attitudes, our culture etc. Ngugi struck me because I am the privileged white female who was raised to believe that the only language worth learning was English, and regularly heard my parents grumble that if these immigrants were going to move to America they "sure as Hell better learn our language" (emphasis added). And because I do see language as empowering (because you chose to learn it and you have the strength/ability to do so) and also largely disempowering (because it can be and often is a symbol of colonizers).

I have tried to present adequately many lines of thought which are only related because they are about language but I fear I have done so inadequately, however I am leaving the remains of my thoughts to be explored and commented on by my classmates.

Topics I wanted to cover:
-how words have specific meanings and implications
-language as cultural
-language as empowering/disempowering
-language as a way to grow closer to other humans in humanity (a vessel to share souls with one another)
-----I want to explore these themes further in conversation with you, please go team go