PERSPECTIVE ON PROFANITY : The Language of Violence : The vocabulary once heard only in rage is replacing conversational English; why don’t the ‘hip’ media see the link?

As an 8-year-old in Harlem, I lived around the corner from what was considered the most notoriously violent block in New York City (West 146th Street, between 7th and 8th avenues). The weather permitting, on Saturday nights my hoodlum-wannabe friends and I would hang out on 146th Street waiting to see who would get killed. We were rarely disappointed.

The killer was usually arrested, charged with second-degree murder and acquitted after a brief trial that revealed he was an average, industrious (hard-working) Negro who had lost his temper during a craps game and overreacted. Although it was a crime for one Negro to kill another in the middle 1940s, it was not a very serious crime.

Urban Negro ghettos of the 1940s and 1950s were so rife with violence resulting in death and maiming that it was regarded as a normal aspect of inner-city life and nothing to become alarmed about unless, of course, the victim was a friend or a relative.

Television, the most addictive drug in America, had not yet been introduced to the country’s underclass and therefore could not be blamed for inspiring or encouraging the violence. Neither could the cause of the bloodletting be justifiably attributed to the fact that every three or four weeks the local movie houses showed films of Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Errol Flynn and Tyrone Power ramming swords through deserving villains. In all probability, the common occurrence of violence in black inner-city America of the 1940s had little or no connection to the coldblooded movie murders committed by Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, George Raft, Edward G. Robinson, et al. Even we children could discern film fantasy from reality.

When today’s outraged and appalled parents condemn the media and filmmakers for having spawned or influenced America’s current horrifying violence epidemic, it is not an utterly false accusation. People under 24 have never lived in an America where movie dialogue was not liberally laced with profanity. Most filmmakers don’t know it, but profanity is the language of violence.

Movie makers gradually introduced profanity disguised as black dialect during the period now referred to as the era of “blaxploitation films” (from 1969 to 1974). “Cotton Comes to Harlem,” “Black Caesar,” “Shaft,” “Across 110th Street” and “Super Fly”--which was probably the most anti-black film made in America since D.W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation”--represent the era. In the early 1970s, cursing on film accelerated with the popularity of the daring profane humor of Richard Pryor’s “in concert” films. And later with Eddie Murphy’s. From there, profanity furtively crept into movie and television scripts as a bold and hip embellishment.

A new movie, “Sugar Hill,” is an exception. This is an artistically eloquent and powerfully dramatic anti-drugs film about a tragically drug-ravaged family struggling desperately to maintain its tenuous grip on life. It is also a radical departure from the stereotypical warring drug-gang films. The violence is graphic but minimal. There is profanity, but only in sufficient amount to give credibility to the characters and their environment.

In the 1940s and ‘50s, the Saturday-night knifings and shootings in the black ghettos were almost always preceded by outbursts of profanity. Usually, before an attacker commenced cursing, he was already reaching for his weapon. It was not uncommon for the victim to be dead or dying while the assailant was still cursing and cutting him.

In modern-day America, profanity is used more frequently than conventional English by many intermediate, high-school and college students and also by city dwellers ages 6 to 60. Profanity appears to be making rapid progress on its way to replacing English as the official language of the American people. It has been irrefutably established as the official language of hip American teen-agers for at least the past five years. Many inner-city high-school and intermediate-school students, who comprise a significant faction of New York City’s bus and subway passengers--I expect it’s the same in Los Angeles--appear to have vocabularies that are pathetically deficient. It is truly saddening to hear them punctuate sentences, clauses and even phrases with the four-letter word for feces.

We Americans have become a society of violence addicts, and the media, which include the movie and music industries, are our drug dealers. They keep us amply supplied with a steady stream of Amy Fisher/Joey Buttafuoco, Lorena/John Wayne Bobbitt, Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan real-life horror stories.

Is it too much to hope that “Sugar Hill” is the beginning of a new genre--the humanized action thriller, short on violence and evoking optimal compassion, inspiring triumph over oppressive human conditions?