Re: apples, upper-class people could rely on the skins of their apples being clean (because they bought better-quality ones and because their houses had maids who kept them clean and didn't have manual workers arriving home covered in filth from their work), so they just bit into the apple.
Middle-class people, who had reliable clean water, washed their apples and then bit into them.
Working-class people peeled them because that was a sure way of removing the (potentially dirty) skin.
By LeCarré's time, the working-class had had clean running water long enough that they were starting to move to washing rather than peeling apples, but that took a long time.
My parents were born in 1944, and my (raised working-class) father peeled apples while my (raised middle-class) mother did not, though my father changed over in the 1980s.
> I am quite fluent in why we don’t characterize non-white people as “minorities” anymore, and even why affirmatively characterizing them as “people of color” is in favor rather than saying “non-white,” which tends to center whiteness.
This is just my two cents and I am aware that many or even most people at elite institutions may feel the opposite but I pretty strongly think this whole business about “POC” vs. “non-white” or “minority” is completely backwards.
First off almost nobody who is actually a racial minority describes themselves as a person of color. When someone asks me my ethnicity I don’t say “oh I’m a person of color” because that’s a) obvious at first glance and b) not an actual identity that means anything. I say “I’m Indian” or “I’m desi” depending on whether or not the person I’m talking to is also brown.
I think the whole “person of color” thing is actually what elevates whiteness by making it into the default. If some people are “of color” then it implies that other (white) people have no color. The connotation is that being not of color is normal and the default whereas being of color makes you ~different~ (this is probably not phrased in the most eloquent way but it’s 7AM).
I also think that “person of color” as a term for all nonwhites implies a certain sense of shared culture or values that doesn’t really exist. The thing I have in common with a Hispanic guy from El Paso or a Korean woman from San Francisco or an Ethiopian immigrant is that we are all not white, so why not just say that? It also just seems kind of forced to say (again, almost nobody self-describes as a “POC”) and sounds too similar to “colored person” with the words switched for my liking (though I am aware some older black people still use that term as a neutral descriptor because it was the norm when they grew up).
Hence I much prefer the terms “nonwhite” and “minority” when discussing those of us of the darker hue. (Yes I am aware than it principle “minority” could refer to many different types of minority group — racial, religious, sexual orientation — but in practice in America it clearly denotes “racial minority” most of the time.)
Rob Henderson has promoted the term "luxury beliefs" to describe this phenomenon. Himself the product of a highly turbulent, low-class, foster home childhood, he's now a Rhodes scholar at Cambridge and in an excellent position to observe this stuff: https://robkhenderson.substack.com/p/status-symbols-and-the-struggle-for
The key observation he would add to what Matt has above here is that only the upper class can *afford* to have such beliefs, and because of this, having these beliefs is an effective marker of the upper class. Not just because the upper class has the time and resources to study the latest faux pas according to NPR each day, but because many of these beliefs (like "defund the police") do not affect them whatsoever. It is only the lower classes who are materially harmed by a mutual destruction of social trust between communities and the police. The upper class like us can retreat to our very low-crime neighborhoods and safe office complexes (or laptops while we work from home in our low-crime neighborhoods).
Really interesting argument. I have a DEI practitioner as a partner (one who, per yesterday’s NYT article, focuses on behaviours and internal practices rather than attitudes - it’s good work when done well) and I think what is sometimes missed is how these changes in language tend to form.
I can say with some certainty that often these changes come about because a practitioner or academic in these fields makes a deliberate language choice in order to reframe an issue. The one I’m aware of at the moment is discussing ‘enslaved peoples’ rather than slaves. And that’s a really interesting reframing in the context of a class or a training seminar. But as that becomes noted and adopted by other trainers or lecturers in this field, or maybe leaks out onto social media, there’s a pattern of it curdling from ‘it’s interesting to frame it in this way’ to ‘it’s better to frame it like this’ to ‘we don’t say ‘slaves’ anymore’ without anyone having consciously decreed that.
Of course that operates out in the world in the exact way you describe - a kind of elite fashion - but the mechanisms for how that takes off initially are probably much less deliberate than might be supposed. Like a fashion, I suppose.
In a former life (which is to say, 5-10 years ago), I was involved in a few high profile efforts to use more inclusive language in open source software.
For example, I replaced some use of gendered pronouns, e.g. "if the caller receives an error, he can either retry or propagate the error", with the singular they. These seems like a straight forward improvement, it doesn't seem hard to feel excluded by the original language. This generated an exceptionally large amount of strong feelings from many people (on both sides).
I think with the benefit of time its pretty clear a) this was a reasonable change that can be objectively defended as more than etiquette, b) it had limited-to-no material impact on how inclusive the actual profession was, c) the amount of objection (and support) this received were out of proportion to, well, anything, d) this ended up being the vanguard for things that seem far less objectively defensible, like an opposition to fieldwork.
The USC adventure highlights how this is actually a fraught exercise for the middle class. It's low class to exhibit vulgar racism or an unsophisticated understanding of systemic racism, but it's also absolutely middle class to get too picky about language. More than anything, the school's email insisting that it's now calling it a "practicum" seems like the stewardess who insists that "the lavatories are located in the rear of the aircraft," instead of "restrooms in the back." I think this is why the renaming wars drive the New York Times set much crazier than any of the underlying worldviews they're based on.
Well, the inevitable happened because of this post. I became a paid subsciber just so I could say thank you. The use of language to deter communication rather than enhance it is one of those things I find really repulsive.
“Language is arbitrary and always changing, so personally I find getting mad at language change’ to be one of the lowest forms of reactionary politics.”
This is badly wrong. Leaving aside the reactionary politics of the Saudi Monarchy, European fascists, the Compte D’Artois and Southern segregationists, there are far lower forms of reactionary politics on display in the US right now. Conservative politicians playing on racial and ethnic prejudices to fracture the unprivileged classes and entrench their own privilege is far more base than normies wanting to keep using the words they grew up using.
Moreover, Matt’s article does an excellent job of explaining why word choice is not arbitrary. It is a potential class signifier. It shows whether you are part of the intellectually dominant class. I am like a middling Yorkshire squire who is proud of his Northern accent and refuses to speak like a home county toff. I’m not part of the national elite and feel no urge to ape their manners
How much of this is just economic? Let's say you're a project manager at an NGO or a university administrator or something, there's not necessarily some specific set of skills that you can point to as to why you deserve this job. So you create a kind of artificial skill set of 'good manners' that keeps the kids of the riff-raff out. Similarly, if you run one of these institutions, these policies make it harder for kids outside the social class to get into them. If you're feeling economically precarious, it's a little cushion of security that reduces the competition.
It's essentially a new scribal class with a new set of hieroglyphs. Except, you know, in Ancient Egypt writing was actually useful, whereas DEI vocabulary...
Another way “inclusive” language excludes is that it commits you - at least verbally - to the progressive approach to diversity/race/equity. But many (most?) people don’t like that approach, so they are excluded.
I think sometimes this result is seen as a benefit (“we don’t want bigots here anyway”). IMO imposing this ideological conformity is quite bad.
I have absolutely come to think of the constant language tweaking currently in vogue on the left as counterproductive to equity goals - because it runs the risk of turning into a form of "gatekeeping", as Matt notes. Unintentionally, to be sure, .but the effect is the same.
Small anecdote: in 2020, my employer held a virtual conference where the keynote speaker was a black woman with a Ph.D - so she was "Dr. So-and-So". She talked about equity and was really good at making the topic accessible and engaging. People really liked her. After we held one of those tragically terrible attempts to recreate a networking event via Zoom, and one of our staffers said how much she loved the "young lady" who gave the keynote. Well, I know that you should not refer to a AfAm female with a Ph.D. as a "young lady" - but the thing is, the person doing it was herself a black woman. And quite clearly was not disrespecting her. It certainly would have been weird for me, a white woman, to suggest that she was being disrespectful and using the wrong language.
It helped be see that language is just not something that everyone is hyper tuned into. I actually try now NOT to immediately adopt whatever is the new vogue in terminology because I think it can be counterproductive and kind of elitist.
The upper crust in England weren’t sitting around trying to think up a new accepted way to peel apples every week. It takes centuries, remember?
It’s the rate of change that sets the DEI movement apart. It’s the speed that has spawned ‘reactionary politics’ and has exposed the fact that the very act of changing rules has become fetishized.
This isn’t language evolving, it’s language metastasizing.
I really liked this article. There are at least three additional reasons why private educational institutions in the K-12 space lean heavily into DEI work. One, the teaching staff tends to be more progressive and less prosperous than the parent body, so DEI work serves an important HR role. Two, there is a genuine desire--often executed clumsily, but still genuine--to make those spaces more hospitable for all students. And three, there is the question of institutional legitimacy, especially in blue states like California and New York. That is, it isn't entirely about training in etiquette, although that certainly is an important component.
Maybe I am missing something, but my first reaction to the opening paragraph was “really?” Of all the questions Matt has helped me think through, this is not a particularly tough one.
Guilt, delusion and fear - in some combination. Guilt of knowing how little of your position in the world is deserved but not being willing to do cede much if any of that advantage. Delusion (inculcated in part in institutions like these) that you have superior agency over the world - basically noblesse oblige. And fear of the pitchforks (perhaps not even conscious) with some naive hope that some performative handwaiving would be absolve you from their future wrath.
Re: apples, upper-class people could rely on the skins of their apples being clean (because they bought better-quality ones and because their houses had maids who kept them clean and didn't have manual workers arriving home covered in filth from their work), so they just bit into the apple.
Middle-class people, who had reliable clean water, washed their apples and then bit into them.
Working-class people peeled them because that was a sure way of removing the (potentially dirty) skin.
By LeCarré's time, the working-class had had clean running water long enough that they were starting to move to washing rather than peeling apples, but that took a long time.
My parents were born in 1944, and my (raised working-class) father peeled apples while my (raised middle-class) mother did not, though my father changed over in the 1980s.
> I am quite fluent in why we don’t characterize non-white people as “minorities” anymore, and even why affirmatively characterizing them as “people of color” is in favor rather than saying “non-white,” which tends to center whiteness.
This is just my two cents and I am aware that many or even most people at elite institutions may feel the opposite but I pretty strongly think this whole business about “POC” vs. “non-white” or “minority” is completely backwards.
First off almost nobody who is actually a racial minority describes themselves as a person of color. When someone asks me my ethnicity I don’t say “oh I’m a person of color” because that’s a) obvious at first glance and b) not an actual identity that means anything. I say “I’m Indian” or “I’m desi” depending on whether or not the person I’m talking to is also brown.
I think the whole “person of color” thing is actually what elevates whiteness by making it into the default. If some people are “of color” then it implies that other (white) people have no color. The connotation is that being not of color is normal and the default whereas being of color makes you ~different~ (this is probably not phrased in the most eloquent way but it’s 7AM).
I also think that “person of color” as a term for all nonwhites implies a certain sense of shared culture or values that doesn’t really exist. The thing I have in common with a Hispanic guy from El Paso or a Korean woman from San Francisco or an Ethiopian immigrant is that we are all not white, so why not just say that? It also just seems kind of forced to say (again, almost nobody self-describes as a “POC”) and sounds too similar to “colored person” with the words switched for my liking (though I am aware some older black people still use that term as a neutral descriptor because it was the norm when they grew up).
Hence I much prefer the terms “nonwhite” and “minority” when discussing those of us of the darker hue. (Yes I am aware than it principle “minority” could refer to many different types of minority group — racial, religious, sexual orientation — but in practice in America it clearly denotes “racial minority” most of the time.)
https://youtu.be/9TBGPcrZItY
It really is shibboleths all the way down.
“We don’t say third world; we say global south”
“Doesn’t global south just mean third world? Like aren’t we talking about the same countries”
“Yes but third world is offensive”
“But regardless of what term you use, you’re still grouping these countries together just because they are poor and underdeveloped”
“No we are grouping them together because they all suffer from the legacy of colonialism”
“…which resulted in them being poor and underdeveloped. We are literally saying the same thing”
“But you’re saying it the wrong way.”
Rob Henderson has promoted the term "luxury beliefs" to describe this phenomenon. Himself the product of a highly turbulent, low-class, foster home childhood, he's now a Rhodes scholar at Cambridge and in an excellent position to observe this stuff: https://robkhenderson.substack.com/p/status-symbols-and-the-struggle-for
The key observation he would add to what Matt has above here is that only the upper class can *afford* to have such beliefs, and because of this, having these beliefs is an effective marker of the upper class. Not just because the upper class has the time and resources to study the latest faux pas according to NPR each day, but because many of these beliefs (like "defund the police") do not affect them whatsoever. It is only the lower classes who are materially harmed by a mutual destruction of social trust between communities and the police. The upper class like us can retreat to our very low-crime neighborhoods and safe office complexes (or laptops while we work from home in our low-crime neighborhoods).
Really interesting argument. I have a DEI practitioner as a partner (one who, per yesterday’s NYT article, focuses on behaviours and internal practices rather than attitudes - it’s good work when done well) and I think what is sometimes missed is how these changes in language tend to form.
I can say with some certainty that often these changes come about because a practitioner or academic in these fields makes a deliberate language choice in order to reframe an issue. The one I’m aware of at the moment is discussing ‘enslaved peoples’ rather than slaves. And that’s a really interesting reframing in the context of a class or a training seminar. But as that becomes noted and adopted by other trainers or lecturers in this field, or maybe leaks out onto social media, there’s a pattern of it curdling from ‘it’s interesting to frame it in this way’ to ‘it’s better to frame it like this’ to ‘we don’t say ‘slaves’ anymore’ without anyone having consciously decreed that.
Of course that operates out in the world in the exact way you describe - a kind of elite fashion - but the mechanisms for how that takes off initially are probably much less deliberate than might be supposed. Like a fashion, I suppose.
In a former life (which is to say, 5-10 years ago), I was involved in a few high profile efforts to use more inclusive language in open source software.
For example, I replaced some use of gendered pronouns, e.g. "if the caller receives an error, he can either retry or propagate the error", with the singular they. These seems like a straight forward improvement, it doesn't seem hard to feel excluded by the original language. This generated an exceptionally large amount of strong feelings from many people (on both sides).
I think with the benefit of time its pretty clear a) this was a reasonable change that can be objectively defended as more than etiquette, b) it had limited-to-no material impact on how inclusive the actual profession was, c) the amount of objection (and support) this received were out of proportion to, well, anything, d) this ended up being the vanguard for things that seem far less objectively defensible, like an opposition to fieldwork.
The USC adventure highlights how this is actually a fraught exercise for the middle class. It's low class to exhibit vulgar racism or an unsophisticated understanding of systemic racism, but it's also absolutely middle class to get too picky about language. More than anything, the school's email insisting that it's now calling it a "practicum" seems like the stewardess who insists that "the lavatories are located in the rear of the aircraft," instead of "restrooms in the back." I think this is why the renaming wars drive the New York Times set much crazier than any of the underlying worldviews they're based on.
Well, the inevitable happened because of this post. I became a paid subsciber just so I could say thank you. The use of language to deter communication rather than enhance it is one of those things I find really repulsive.
Damn. It’s like he read the line in the Wapo profile about his bratty essay upon his Harvard acceptance and said “oh yeah? Watch this.”
“Language is arbitrary and always changing, so personally I find getting mad at language change’ to be one of the lowest forms of reactionary politics.”
This is badly wrong. Leaving aside the reactionary politics of the Saudi Monarchy, European fascists, the Compte D’Artois and Southern segregationists, there are far lower forms of reactionary politics on display in the US right now. Conservative politicians playing on racial and ethnic prejudices to fracture the unprivileged classes and entrench their own privilege is far more base than normies wanting to keep using the words they grew up using.
Moreover, Matt’s article does an excellent job of explaining why word choice is not arbitrary. It is a potential class signifier. It shows whether you are part of the intellectually dominant class. I am like a middling Yorkshire squire who is proud of his Northern accent and refuses to speak like a home county toff. I’m not part of the national elite and feel no urge to ape their manners
How much of this is just economic? Let's say you're a project manager at an NGO or a university administrator or something, there's not necessarily some specific set of skills that you can point to as to why you deserve this job. So you create a kind of artificial skill set of 'good manners' that keeps the kids of the riff-raff out. Similarly, if you run one of these institutions, these policies make it harder for kids outside the social class to get into them. If you're feeling economically precarious, it's a little cushion of security that reduces the competition.
It's essentially a new scribal class with a new set of hieroglyphs. Except, you know, in Ancient Egypt writing was actually useful, whereas DEI vocabulary...
Another way “inclusive” language excludes is that it commits you - at least verbally - to the progressive approach to diversity/race/equity. But many (most?) people don’t like that approach, so they are excluded.
I think sometimes this result is seen as a benefit (“we don’t want bigots here anyway”). IMO imposing this ideological conformity is quite bad.
I have absolutely come to think of the constant language tweaking currently in vogue on the left as counterproductive to equity goals - because it runs the risk of turning into a form of "gatekeeping", as Matt notes. Unintentionally, to be sure, .but the effect is the same.
Small anecdote: in 2020, my employer held a virtual conference where the keynote speaker was a black woman with a Ph.D - so she was "Dr. So-and-So". She talked about equity and was really good at making the topic accessible and engaging. People really liked her. After we held one of those tragically terrible attempts to recreate a networking event via Zoom, and one of our staffers said how much she loved the "young lady" who gave the keynote. Well, I know that you should not refer to a AfAm female with a Ph.D. as a "young lady" - but the thing is, the person doing it was herself a black woman. And quite clearly was not disrespecting her. It certainly would have been weird for me, a white woman, to suggest that she was being disrespectful and using the wrong language.
It helped be see that language is just not something that everyone is hyper tuned into. I actually try now NOT to immediately adopt whatever is the new vogue in terminology because I think it can be counterproductive and kind of elitist.
The upper crust in England weren’t sitting around trying to think up a new accepted way to peel apples every week. It takes centuries, remember?
It’s the rate of change that sets the DEI movement apart. It’s the speed that has spawned ‘reactionary politics’ and has exposed the fact that the very act of changing rules has become fetishized.
This isn’t language evolving, it’s language metastasizing.
I really liked this article. There are at least three additional reasons why private educational institutions in the K-12 space lean heavily into DEI work. One, the teaching staff tends to be more progressive and less prosperous than the parent body, so DEI work serves an important HR role. Two, there is a genuine desire--often executed clumsily, but still genuine--to make those spaces more hospitable for all students. And three, there is the question of institutional legitimacy, especially in blue states like California and New York. That is, it isn't entirely about training in etiquette, although that certainly is an important component.
Maybe I am missing something, but my first reaction to the opening paragraph was “really?” Of all the questions Matt has helped me think through, this is not a particularly tough one.
Guilt, delusion and fear - in some combination. Guilt of knowing how little of your position in the world is deserved but not being willing to do cede much if any of that advantage. Delusion (inculcated in part in institutions like these) that you have superior agency over the world - basically noblesse oblige. And fear of the pitchforks (perhaps not even conscious) with some naive hope that some performative handwaiving would be absolve you from their future wrath.
Is there more to it?