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 wonder if that also didn’t have something to do with dental health (presumably worse in working classes in Victorian times). Peeled, and especially cut, apple is much easier to chew.
It may have, but both my parents cited concerns about the cleanliness of the peel as their reason. That doesn't mean that dental health wasn't a major factor, of course.
It was/is also a tradition and a signifier of class, but you'd never say that unless you are consciously trying to change class (as the character in the novel is doing).
My grandfather was a train driver (we don't call them "engineers") back in the days of steam and would presumably have arrived home covered in soot in need of a bath - which would mean soot everywhere, however carefully my grandmother would have cleaned.
Incidentally, if you've ever picked apples fresh from the tree, they tend to accumulate a sticky layer over the skin which needs to be washed off before you eat them (not always, but often). They are, of course, washed before being sold now, but they probably weren't in Victorian times, so the maid (or whatever servant) would wash them before putting them out on the table in an upper-class household, while a middle-class household would expect you to wash your own apple before eating it, which was my mother's practice.
“They are, of course, washed before being sold now”
Not in the US they’re not, and I suspect not in the rest of the world either. Sure, they look nice and shiny, but that’s because they’re sprayed with a food-grade wax during packing.
When I was a teenager, I worked for a large apple company that had dozens of orchards in the town where I grew up as well as in the surrounding towns. I worked in the orchards some, but mostly in the packing plant which had enormous refrigerated rooms where bins of apples were stored during the harvest and a packing line where the apples were sorted by size, graded by appearance, and manually packed into boxes for shipment. The packing line began with a open tank of water with a hydraulic platform where a wooden bin of apples would be lowered to float out and be picked up by a conveyor consisting of plastic cups - each cup on a pivot and weighted at one end. The plastic cups would tip out their contents at different points, depending on the weight of the individual apple, onto conveyor belts eight or so inches below. After coming out of the water the apples were sprayed with a quick drying wax from overhead nozzles.
One of my jobs was to retrieve bins of apples from the refrigerators with a forklift and line them up near the water tank for the guy who operated that station. The water in the tank was changed…not all that often. The apple bins had come in from the orchards, where they had been sitting on the ground while being filled by the Jamaican pickers. The orchards, between the trees, were mostly longish grass, trimmed two or three times during the growing season, but inevitably some bins came in with soil caked on parts of their skids as well as other contaminants both on the outside and inside of the bins: contaminants like apple leaves, stems, insects, and the occasional dead field mouse.
Even on the days when the packing line started with clean water, after cycling a couple dozen bins through the float tank, the water would be pretty muddy and by the end of the day the water had taken on the color of coffee with too little cream.
Yes, we were rich enough to get lots of sugar before modern dental care (even just toothbrushes, toothpaste, etc) so we had terrible cavities and rotten teeth through the nineteenth century
But we had NHS dentistry from the 1940s and actual oral health is pretty good these days (though it's been in crisis for a few years now and I suspect it is declining). We don't do anywhere near as much cosmetic dentistry as the US, but that's also true for much of the rest of Europe. As long as they're not rotten, a few teeth at funny angles isn't much of a deal.
Somewhere around 2010, UK oral health was better than the US - but Obamacare has improved it for poor Americans and the decline of NHS dentistry has damaged a lot of poorer Brits, so it may have turned around in the last few years.
There's a stereotype of Brits having *ugly* teeth, because NHS dentistry doesn't go in for orthodontics to anything like the extent that is normal in the US. But our actual oral health is AIUI pretty good, or at least comparable to peer nations.
Conversely, we have a stereotype of Americans having weirdly perfect teeth like pod people. It can be actively distracting in Hollywood movies, especially when American actors are playing pre-industrial people who wouldn't have had access to orthodontics. The love interest in Braveheart's dazzling smile forces itself to mind.
At my first job after college my officemate, who grew up in China, peeled all fruit, including peaches. Thin-skinned fruit (again, like peaches), he'd blanch in hot water before peeling. Same idea - he got used to that, growing up worried about clean water and pesticide contamination and so on.
> 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.)
I have a good friend, a woman of latin origin who worked at a fancy Manhattan law firm. In a 1:1 a partner gently chastised her for a minor transgression, and mentioned as a woman of color she should be more cognizant of these things. My friend didn't realize she was in a category separate from everyone else and took offense to this.
Just seems kind of wild the old white dudes can still "other" you to your face but now it's in a "progressive" way so it's fine.
It's strange how terms like "colored" and "oriental" come across as racist, but I can't explain why other than association with an era in which overt racism was acceptable.
Older folks in my extended South Asian family have a lot of trouble with this too. They'll grasp for words (since English is not their first language) and say "colored people". When I correct them and say, "No, no, you can't say that, it's people of color", they'll ask what the difference is. And all I can really say is "One's really backwards and racist, and the other is very progressive!"
Basically, when a neutral term for a socially disadvantage group is used over many decades it takes on the negative "overtones" (connotations) associated with prejudice against that group. This is how the term "colored" goes from the being used in the NAACP to being seen as a slur.
“It's strange how terms like ‘colored’ and ’oriental’ come across as racist…”
I mentioned this in a pas comment on SB: My wife is Korean, i.e., she grew up in Korea and came to the US as an adult. She used to hate* being called Asian, but was totally fine with the label Oriental. She saw Oriental as being more correctly descriptive because she looks far, far more like Japanese and Chinese people than she looks like, for instance, a Tamil.
*She more or less gave up caring, because what’s the point in living your life enraged?
That's interesting, because "Asian" is a term I still primarily associate with East Asia / the "Far East", and I believe that connotation is fairly widespread in the US. I don't intuitively think of people from the Indian subcontinent as being "Asian" (and that's not even getting into the rest of the Asian continent).
Also interesting that she associates "oriental" with East Asia specifically, because that is another term with a wide geographic scope depending on the time and place. For example, I've seen Persian-styled rugs referred to as "oriental rugs".
The other big problem with binary labels is that putting white people in a separate category from anyone else could inculcate the idea that white people need to start acting like a coherent racial demographic that needs to promote it's own interests apart from so-called POC.
That would be very bad on the merits but is also counter to everything proponents of equity claim to want.
This is a point Glenn Loury makes very frequently - keep telling white people that they are a monolithic identity group and some are going to believe you and act accordingly.
Yep, whenever I see some DEI material talking about making white people "aware of their whiteness," etc., I feel like I'm in a horror movie watching the drunk/stoned teenagers willfully reading from the book of dark magic in the graveyard at midnight.
This is a huge problem. Asking people to lean into their whiteness as an identity is one of the stupidest, most dangerous things I can think of. There are WAY worse things than the colorblindness ideal. What next, should we encourage Germans to meditate on their Aryan identity?
There is SOME value in asking people that do enjoy privileges to bear that in mind when asked to consider extending those privileges to others. But it needs to be done carefully and with the understanding that improving the lives of some people does not necessarily mean diminishing the lives of others. Society is a positive sum game.
One of my axes to grind with the woke is the abuse of the word privilege. A title of nobility is a privilege. Not being victimized (or being statistically less likely to be victimized) by the state or by individuals very much is not. It’s simply how things ought to be for everyone.
A thousand times this! What an absurdly counterproductive word to use, almost guaranteed to be misinterpreted by someone who doesn't follow "the discourse", and literally wrong to boot!
Probably misinterpreted "by someone who actually needs to be persuaded." I think _I_ understood it without "following the discourse," but I was sympathetic to efforts to remove the legacy of slavery/past mistreatment. But I'd still deflect to conversation to how to be persuasive in general, not the word. For example "Black Lives Matter" has been "misunderstood" but I don't think there was a better slogan.
It's a word. "Relative advantage" would be another. Whatever best gets across the idea (that may not be obvious the first time someone thinks about it.)
It’s a word that already conveys a certain meaning. Moreover it looks at things backwards. The idea of civil right movement etc is to invite more people into the tent of equal rights , into the mainstream, not to kick people out or to delegitimize it. “Privilege” smacks of luxury and excess. No one on America has *or ever had* privileges by the sole virtue of being white. Some people were discriminated against or had their human rights more or less terribly violated because they were perceived as a racial other. That’s not at all the same thing .
To me at least, "privilege" refers to an entitlement that follows immediately from a particular status. Golfers who've previously won the Masters have the privilege of wearing a green jacket when the trophy is presented to a new winner. Any prior winner can do that; anyone else cannot. Segregated Pullman cars involved a system of racial privilege: anyone deemed to be white could, ipso facto, sit in the whites-only car; anyone deemed to be black could not.
That's totally different from the phenomenon of differential treatment by police. White people undoubtedly benefit from being less frequently subjected to abusive and degrading encounters with law enforcement. But if you're white and a police officer does treat you in a humiliating manner, you can't complain by saying, "I'm sorry, there seems to have been some mistake: I'm white, you see, and so by rule I should've gotten preferential treatment."
Post-Jim Crow America really doesn't have racial privileges, at least not ones that redound to the benefit of white people. So if you want people to notice the ways in which certain racial groups are relatively advantaged or disadvantaged in American society, telling them to focus on where they enjoy some racial *privilege* is an absolutely terrible strategy.
It seems to me that if you’re interested in oppression dynamics, the critical characteristic IS minority status. There’s nothing inherent to being a person of color that creates disadvantage, but rather the fact that the person is a minority in the society where they live. Being in a minority of ANY kind (racial, religious, sexual) is inherently going to be on the spectrum from occasionally inconvenient to downright shitty.
That’s far too universalist to be fashionable! It might even make you think of other societies , countries , or historical periods, god forbid!
Seriously though, the irony of the woke is that they are the most Eurocentric (or rather america-centric) presentist people in the world who really do seem to believe in a 21st cent twist on the white man’s burden.
But even in the that framing sometimes minorities are the ones running the show. Just some off-the-top-of-my-head examples:
Prior (and largely also, post) the French Revolution a tiny Aristocracy ran everything. Modern Americans tend to not "see class" but that was a social construct every bit as real as our modern conceptions of race. Aristocrats only married and socialized with each other and a person on the street could id them by the way they dressed, walked and talked.
Peruvians of European descent are maybe 10% of their population but disproportionately wealthy and in positions of power.
White people were the minority in Aparthaid S Africa.
Yes, this doesn't track at all. Brahmins in India, etc. Even in the U.S., there used to be a WASP elite that was clearly distinct from the general "white" majority. The critical characteristic clearly isn't minority status, certainly not in isolation.
Not entirely. Color is a social construct just like race, just like class. David's stereotypical Punjabi would not be a POC in stereotypical Texas at all.
This is one of my least favorite lazy shibboleths. If color is a construct and so is race, is ethnicity as well?
Then surely gender is? Oh boy, and don’t get me started about the nuclear family… these are some of the most common, most basic, most widely-used-across-cultures categorical definitions in use by the human race. Why do (some subset of) progressives persist in attacking and undermining them so?
"If color is a construct and so is race, is ethnicity as well?"
Not to be glib, but yep, it is. Society is just a bunch of social constructs, many of them critically important to the way we live, but some of them quite superficial. Family, as you identify, is one of the former, but POC on the other hand feels quite superficial.
I would personally say that color is the type of construct that could be "de-constructed," to everyone's benefit in the way that say, hair length is. Ditto for race. But ethnicity probably can't be, although it could be minimized in many contexts. And certainly doing away with family as a social construct would make no sense at all.
I’d add that race is a very historically dependent social construct that didn’t exist in the same manner before the modern era, so empirically we can do without it!
This is a decent explanation for why I dislike "LGBT" or "LGBTQIA+ (however many letters and numbers they've added)" to describe people. I am gay. I'm not a lesbian, I am not transgender, I am not asexual, or bisexual, or any other sexual minority. I'm gay. The gay civil rights movement and the transgender civil rights movement are not the same. The issues are quite different, and while they intersect in some ways: they do not in many others.
Since I was a kid the alphabet soup of sexual and gender minorities has confounded me. With LGBT, I understand through "LGB"- a very sensible political coalition (not a personal identifier though), but T lost me. The addition of Q sort of mad sense as a stopping point to say everyone can be in the group but that just begs the question why not just use Queer, and why are LGB and T in a group together to begin with. Then adding the adding I again confounds me because I represents a set of physical medical conditions which seem entirely unrelated to LGB and I guess related to T specifically in terms of non-traditional appearance and surgical implications. A is the most baffling to me because I am not sure what the political implications of being asexual are. Like I guess you're just in some sense outside the hetero-norm but still confusing though I see some coalition there with LGB. And the final plus is the worst offender of all because what is Q if not serving as the plus.
Queer is probably the most accurate description, but I don’t like the implication (which was bigoted when it was used previously). Because homosexuals, transgender people, etc aren’t queer at all.
I share your sentiments from the other end of the acronym. Historical circumstances put everyone under the same yoke, and there's never been enough just-T to splinter off and form our own separate tribe. (Nor would I want there to be, that'd indicate Something Went Wrong in a big way.) But it's always felt somewhat forced outside of theoryland. When I spend time with gays and lesbians, it's hard not to be struck by how...utterly banal they usually are? Yes, there's sometimes the stereotypical mannerisms and such. But my brain defaults to rounding off "gay person" or "lesbian person" to just "person". Not much more remarkable than their hair colour or whatever. (Granted, the demographic breakdown in SF is...uh...not reflective of the broader population.)
By contrast - us trans people are, frankly, usually weird. Not said in a judgey disapproving way, more like...well...personality comorbidity? Being an extreme outlier on one dimension makes one much more likely to be an extreme outlier on others. It's really unusual for me to meet a trans person whose sole differentiating characteristic is their gender identity...that seems to be the Platonic ideal of both lurid erotica and certain activists, an archetypal Perfectly Normal Person who just happens to be trans. (A trans woman, specifically, since no one ever remembers that trans men exist too...except maybe in the UK.) And, of course, a group unified by large standard deviations from normies will itself have large internal deviations. There's often so little in common once you scratch the surface grievances about gender stuff...a feeling of "if you weren't in my Specialist Tribe, I wouldn't like you, actually".
So it's been very weird watching the Marriage Equality 2.0 playbook attempting to be recycled for trans people...the script simply doesn't fit. And there's a contradiction with insisting that sex and gender are totally separate unrelated things - yet still grouping LGB and T together! Similarly, a common trans advocacy retort to TERFs is that the category "woman" shouldn't be defined by their shared oppression...yet that applies just as much to LGB + T. I think it's admirable to aspire to the same "equal treatment" outcomes...but the required changes for that kind of parity are, well, just a really different ask in so many cases.
FWIW I strongly disagree as a bisexual man. I think that in general, people who fall within the LGBTQIA+ umbrella tend to share substantial common threads of experience related to being a minority along gender and sexuality lines (in part because I think that negative attitudes towards LGB people often interrelated to negative attitudes towards gender nonconformity). Moreover, there's a long history of shared community and joint activism among all the different groups under the LGBTQIA+ label. It also feels to me that to reject the idea of a shared label now after gay marriage has been recognized but when transgender rights remain politically controversial is a very selfish move.
Sure, but there is still a sense in which there is a straight majority, right? How would you classify non-straight people as a group? One increasingly popular moniker is queer, but I hate for its history as a slur, its problematic literal meaning (obviously related to the history), and for its extreme vagueness. LGBT is actually not bad imo in that it actually reminds everyone that we are in fact a bunch of *separate* distinct group, that do however share something in common even if its only a negative thing (not being part of the cisgender straight super-majority)
I personally am not particularly interested in the straight-not straight; trans-cis dichotomies. I think they obscure far more than they illuminate. Furthermore I don't think creating a category has for all of "not straight; not cis" people has been particularly constructive. Again: like POC there is not as much commonality as people think.
The argument for the gay civil rights movement was that gay people really aren't that different from straight people. We wanted to be able to enjoy the same institutions that straight people did; we just wanted to marry people we were attracted to and not get fired for our identity. The "LGBTQ" trend today feels far more like making an identity of something that is irrelevant and highlighting differences for the sake of highlighting differences (and, I suspect, there is some "I am an oppressed minority because of my sexuality" going on as well; being straight is no longer 'cool').
May I remind you that the “gay civil rights” fight included lesbians? That they too wanted the right for marriage equality and have since exercised it in similar numbers?
And I think the tension between particularist and integrationist forces are found in every minority. There was the gay marrriage fight but there was also the fringe arguing against the “heteronormative” family structure. Today there are fringe elements but there are also trans people who just want to be accepted as who they are (eg allowed to serve in army , a struggle paralleling that of gays a very short while ago!)
In short I think there is universal applicability in the pluralism and tolerance and it’s smart politics besides to show solidarity. That being said- I agree we should push back agaisnt bad or stupid directions.
Obviously Lesbians and Gays both fought for the same civil rights.
But the Trans-Rights movement is quite different than the Gay rights movement. Trans activists are pushing a far different agenda with broader and more basic changes to our society than "let people of the same sex get married to each other" which is nowhere near as transformational.
Which goes back to what I liked about what Milan said above: being gay and being trans are somewhat similar, but they're not the same thing. Bunching the movements together obscures more than it enlightens in my mind.
Yes, there is also a real conflict between some in trans community and some in homosexual community particularly lesbian. Many in trans movement would like to destroy binary concept of gender and make everything a spectrum.
Meanwhile, some homosexual are are adamantly sort of extreme in their gender identity. Many lesbians see their community as a hyper-feminine subculture that has rejected masculinity. And so people like JK Rowling, hope I'm not putting words into her mouth, complain about this, and how trans activism is in conflict with their identity, then get epic backlash for it.
We need to find room to accept people that don't agree with us and just leave them be to do their own thing IMO!
I obviously want to tread very carefully here due to the history you cite, but I would rather have queer stick as an easy to say one syllable word over the growing alphabet soup assault of the other direction.
I wish we could find a more positive or neutral word to replacing queer. Gay is positive. Lesbian is neutral. Bi is a bit medical for my liking but sort of gets the point across, ditto trans. But an overarching terms that’s not insulting is lacking.
"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."
I have a similar issue with the term "brown" (which, as an aside, literally makes my stomach turn as I wonder how it suddenly became acceptable for people to talk like a 1950s Jim Crow sheriff) -- why is a 100% anglophone Hispanic whose family has lived in the US since the New Mexico territory was annexed being grouped for political purposes with an immigrant Punjabi Sikh based just on their shared skin tone, something which has no historical basis in either American culture or law?
Colloquially amongst younger people, what Milan says is definitely right. I think in the US the major racial categories being White, Black, Hispanic, and Asian didn't really cover well the massive populations in north africa, the middle east, and south asia and so brown came to mean that. Or it has totally different origins and I'm speaking out of my a**.
Edit: For clarification, this is not how I would categorize race, just my perception of what the common parlance is. I am well aware that Hispanic is an imprecise term in its colloquial speech and personally I typically use latin to refer people from Latin America. Frankly, I try by best to avoid race at all costs especially when country of origin/heritage is appropriate and available. My point is that in standard US speech White refers to people with pale skin and European descent, Black is dark skin and African descent, Hispanic is anyone from North America who is not white or black and from an American country other than the US (except for the southwest) or Canada, and Asian refers to a range of skin tones but mostly is meant to mean east Asian heritage. Again, this is not my personal view, just my impression of how the terms are most often used.
You can use the word however you want, but if you refer to "brown people" without further context explaining it, that's probably going to result in many listeners thinking you're including Hispanics. I mean I've never encountered anyone in real life use the term "brown" to refer to a group of people at all, but I certainly get a steady dose of it via mainstream national media (NPR, CNN, etc.) and it's *not* being used as a colloquial synonym for just South Asians. (E.g.,: “'Driving While Brown' Chronicles How Latino Activists Brought Down Arizona's Sheriff Joe Arpaio" -- https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2021/04/20/driving-while-brown-joe-arpaio ; "Many Latinos with indigenous or mestizo backgrounds – people who may otherwise self-identify as 'brown' – are naturally reluctant to fit themselves into the black-white binary of conventional US metrics." -- https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/04/opinions/latino-vote-midterms-republicans-democrats-gest/index.html).
I assumed “brown” referred to anyone whose skin was darker than a white person, and therefore subject to colorism/racism, but wasn’t black. I always took it to include darker skinned Hispanic people (a fair-skinned Spaniard, probably not).
That's been my experience, as someone raised around Mexican people and who married into a Mexican-American family. They would say they are brown, even the ones who are fair-skinned. Census forms be damned, none of them would say they are white.
"I remember the first time I realized I was a foreigner in my country of birth.
"A month into my first term at a large midwestern university, I got an invitation for a banquet meal in honor of the recipients of some bundle of free cash I’d been awarded. I vaguely remembered having accepted it, but had assumed it was due to grades or SAT scores. Somewhat mystified, I put on that blue blazer most of us had in college (the one with the jingly brass buttons), and headed to the Alumni Hall for the free chow.
"I looked around. Most of the other guests were either Black or Mexican-American in what was and is a very white Midwestern state. As I sat there eating the chicken dinner, and after some interesting chit-chat with my neighbors whom I found as exotic as they apparently found me, it finally dawned on me: Oh, I see….apparently I’m some sort of minority now or something. These people think of me as some sort of Other, and this whole song and dance is part of that Othering."
After 9/11 I used to travel for work a lot, often with a colleague who was born in Sri Lanka. He was tagged for random searches every time. Such rotten luck!
I confess that I don't even know, in a basic extensional sense, who is actually covered by the term "people of color."
There's a term I see not infrequently these days, BIPOC, which I'm told stands for "black, indigenous, and/or person of color." That seems to suggest that at least some black people are *not* persons of color; otherwise, there'd be no need to add the "B." But I would've thought blackness was the paradigm case of being "of color," so that's confusing to me.
Similarly for "indigenous": the abbreviation implies that there are some I that are neither B nor POC. Does that mean they're white?
I think what you’re missing in BIPOC is an order rooted in degree of marginalization. I am not sure I agree with the order. Maybe IPBOC, considering what Native Americans had in say 1500 (all of North and South America with diverse cultures) and what they have today...that’s a big loss.
It’s completely off the scale of merely disparate outcomes in income, education or health. The legacy of European migration to the America’s on its native peoples is enormous. What do the America’s look like today if European people stayed home? That’s a good question for the alternative history crowd.
Thanks for the explanation -- that at least takes care of the apparent definitional confusion that I was pointing out.
It only makes me more antipathetic to the term, though. I can't fathom the appeal of a category meant to apply to what may or may not be the vast bulk of the world's population that's based on a highly tendentious thesis about which members are relatively more "marginal" to some unspecified "center" -- a thesis that has all the marks of being a gratuitous generalization from the historical experience of one society in particular.
The newest ones tho are "minoritized" and "racialized"- like, heavily suggesting this is all white people's fault, I think? But also, aren't white people being racialized too when you call them white? 🤔🤔🤔
The idea, I think, is to remind us that race is socially constructed. Of course whites are also racialized, but the argument is that in a white majority society white is seen as the transparent standard. Just like “having an accent” implies having a foreign or minority accent, although every language speaker actually has an accent.
Those terms read as painful. Verbing weirds language, indeed. What would the full conjugations even be...racialization? Minoritied? Nothing was wrong with "other"...so score another point for the Carne wordsmiths, I guess. (Carnists?)
As good a piece of rhetoric as it was, that essay "America's First White President" (Coates, I think?) sure made me think: wow, way to encourage white people to see themselves as a separate and distinct race. Solidarity goes in the same bin as colourblindness...in exchange we got the new and improved [Coming Soon].
I could find both of these terms being useful in the sense of "racialized" meaning "unnecessarily injecting race into something" and "minoritized" meaning "unnecessarily putting someone in an out group". But as your further points suggest, that it likely not what the people you cite have in mind.
And that’s exactly the point. In some contexts, Jewish people might be minoritized, and in some contexts, they might be treated like the majority. The implicit claim is that this is true of all groups.
Dominance constructs are weird and we'd all conveniently rather not think about them too logically because they are fundamentally unfair...but we should try
I don't know that's really responsive to FrigidWind's point about being question-begging, though. Suppose that for any quality that something has, there's a corresponding causal account of how it came to be that way. If we point verbally to the process by naming the quality, isn't that just a circuitous and possibly misleading way of pointing to the quality itself?
That is, if my mattress is soft, should I instead say that it's softized -- since there surely is some set of causes by which it acquired the quality of softness? Is the computer I'm typing this on not "old," but rather "oldized?"
Or, in Moliere's classic example, is saying that sleep is caused by a "dormitive potency" saying anything meaningful at all? Is replacing saying one is asleep with saying one has been "sleepized" any different?
If there is some constant process by which the softness of your mattress is being renewed and reinforced, it might sometimes be helpful to describe it that way. Once in a while, it might be useful to distinguish who has a clean kitchen because it was cleaned once and then never used, from who has a clean kitchen because they constantly thoroughly clean it after every time they use it.
I think the point is to emphasize that the state of being a minority is not a purely intrinsic state, and the relevant factor here is not just the numerical fact (the way that people whose last name starts with a letter in the second half of the alphabet are minorities) but is the fact about how people are treated differently as a result of the status (it's rare to find a situation where someone is minoritized as a result of the first letter of their last name - though if you constantly call on people in alphabetical order, you might be doing so).
It's of course surely fair to note that most DEI activity *continues* to treat people differently as a result of their status, but their claim is that the *quality* of different treatment might be relevant to whether a treatment is a "minoritization" or not.
I agree that if there are multiple distinct causal processes that might account for a kitchen's being clean, it's useful to have different words to refer to each of them. But those can't *replace* the concept of cleanness, because it has to be possible for us to agree that a given kitchen is clean while disagreeing about whether it got that way by Path A (frequent cleaning) or Path B (infrequent use).
The real question is whether the term for the process has some independent substantive content, so that "X outcome was produced by Y process" is a falsifiable, non-tautological claim. If "minoritized" just means "treated in whatever way it is that such treatment has the effect of making one a minority," then it's really still the concept of "minority" that's doing all the work.
The danger, though, is that by treating "minoritized" as equivalent to "minority," some unstated substantive assertion about how minorities come to be that way gets smuggled into the definition of "minority" itself. Frankly, I worry that for the language-updaters that's often precisely the desired outcome.
I do not make these things up…. One example: https://www.pdcnet.org/tej/content/tej_2022_0999_1_7_99 “Using “minoritized” makes it clear that being minoritized is about power and equity not numbers, connects racial oppression to the oppression of women, and gives us an easy way to conceive of intersectionality as being a minoritized member of a minoritized group. ”
One of my elderly aunts still obsessively wears tons of makeup as she was often not accepted as part of the dominant white culture as a child and desperately fought for that her whole life.
Folks forget that in the 40s 50s that Italians Greeks and Jews and others with moderately darker skin, many taken for granted as part of "white" or dominant culture today, weren't considered "White" just a few decades ago, did not have access to top schools (like ones I've attended) or dominant culture.
You can check out the yearbooks of such institutions like my high school alma mater Lawrenceville and find that if you go back just a few decades, almost all students had English king or apostle names, and there was absolutely no one off-white til until after civil rights era and associated reforms. Same went for many country clubs and social clubs.
Yeah, I wouldn’t hate “racialized” if it were being used to point out when someone (of any ethnicity) is being flattened into an avatar of a socially-constructed racial group.
In social justice logic, a white person can never be “minoritized” on the basis of race because we live in a white supremecist world, QED- nothing to do with quantities of people. Women are also “minoritized” by this logic despite being 52% of the population becuz patriarchy. (Views expressed are not my own.)
Agree for similar reasons as you (as seen my last name).
I actually think there is a more practical reason "POC" has become in vogue for the same reason I use it ; Twitter has a character limit and it's an easy shorthand way to abbreviate and space.
Sure, but I suspect that's just in part because "online" language just starts becoming part of everyday use more generally. I've definitely had people say "O M G" when seeing something surprising or saying "L O L" . Heck I suspect I've done it without even realizing it.
So yeah, agree with your substantive point about "POC" as a term. But I honestly think it's just become a shorthand for some people use without even thinking about it (perhaps something we should push back on)
I think the excessive usage of acronyms and initialisms could also be a sign of being Excessively Online, as they can be simple to use in text but exhaustive to use in everyday conversation.
My ancestors since at least the early 1600s, and probably long before, were all from Ireland and Scotland, and thus generally poor and very "white." I have very little pigmentation but even as a child, eight decades ago, it was evident to me that my skin could not realistically be regarded as white in any literal sense. One of the apartment buildings I grew up in had a janitor who was an albino, with a skin distinctly paler than mine. (A very sweet man, who went out of his way to teach a curious little boy the art of throwing coal on the grate of a furnace, raising steam for building heat.) Even at age 6 I could recognize at least some of the multiple levels of absurdity in calling Mr. Evans a, "colored man."
I spent my career as a scientist, working always in quite meritocratic settings where almost all traces of animus against the Irish had faded—one saw only flashes of it among a few of the oldest men. To a very great extent all that really mattered was ability, and few cared about race or ethnicity, per se. Although most of my education and work was in physical sciences and mathematics, I had always also been interested in anthropology and paleoanthropology, and had absorbed much of the anthropologist's detached interest in cultural variations. In particular I had recognized that attitudes ostensibly about race or ethnicity are very largely in fact about cultural traits. Generally, people face positive and negative sanctions from both in- and out-groups to align their cultural traits "appropriately" with their socially-assigned racial/ethnic identity. On the whole this actually seems to work fairly well for most people. Indeed, many are indignant or offended when called out for exerting such pressure. They are usually genuinely unaware of how much pain their "natural" and seemingly innate behaviors can cause.
I early learned that it was generally safest and most productive to avoid racial and ethnic categorization altogether and deal with people individually, without labels. At the same time, it was very clear to me that if you knew something of a person's ethnic origins you had valuable information regarding the likely trend of their culturally-conditioned values and traits.
As for Milan Singh, the notion that anyone could be ignorant of the denotation and connotations of his surname strikes me as a bit astonishing. Surely "Singh" is as distinctively Indian as "O'Neil" is Irish.
Thanks for sharing! I found your personal recollection about the fading animus agaisnt Irish among the older men of say 6 decades ago(?) especially interesting.
To your last question. May I remind you that not all of us have been around for 8 decades, and moreover that the us remains a nation of immigrants (and, besides, that some here aren’t even American). Without growing up and living besides Indian communities, and considering their underrepresentation in western media (a fortiori canonical western literature) , why is it so surprising that some of us wouldn’t see “Singh” and have an immediate understanding of the ethnic implications ? It’s no more surprising than the fact that I bet for half the people here “Goldstein” is not that obvious as it was for Orwell and is for Rowling , or indeed how O’Neil might not be obvious to those not raised in the Anglosphere or with a healthy dose of English literature (for which incidentally the Irish and the Scots made an enormous contribution!)
I've always thought that "POC" was a weird circumlocution for "non-white," and people get really uncomfortable when you point it out. But hey, at least it looks like I'm not alone 😂
I think it's a word that people use to describe other people most of the time - I've never known anyone who describes themselves as "BIPOC" but I've seen it in many, many institutional statements etc.
You’re right in your reasoning, and you’re far from alone. MY is making a rhetorical hyperbole. Using minorities is fine and in fact preferable in many cases. It has the heuristic advantage of suggesting the inherent reason for potential discrimination /power imbalance (the crude realty of numbers, the perceptions it creates of difference). It has the further advantage of being universal and neutral- applicable to any society and not using very historically and culturally-specific , highly loaded and ontologically questonable terms such as color/white as you point out. And yes it’s broader, but that is an advantage more often than not. Forces you to think about other kinds of disadvantages, but also to what actually is unique to racial minorities as opposed to others. All and al a *much* better term in many cases.
Well the other guys are talking about "a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States" (while keeping plutocratic ghoulishness quiet) so I will take my chances
Most of the time the results are absurd, like the examples of Thomas and Wigan above, but I do think it's useful to comprehend that almost everyone is privileged in some manners and oppressed in other manners. The precise amounts of each differ by person, of course, and are rarely in equal proportions, but it would be a lot more honest way to confront these societal differences that come up. But we tend not to because it complicates simple narratives that people want to push.
I find it interesting that, like the author in the video, we continue to assume white is “default” and “not seen” in America. Seems like over the last ten years there’s been a staggering increase in talking about whiteness, and never in a good way (not that I want to talk about whiteness in a good way either). At what point do we admit that “white” is another way we “racialize” people just like all the other groups?
Thanks for sharing your insightful and very much valid perspective Milan
There are others however, and although I am not a person of color, I am friends and acquaintances with several who describe themselves as such. Please consider that to the ancestors of African American slaves, nearly all cultural connection to their ancestry has been removed as the institution of slavery very systematically destroyed such, the language and practices, education and literacy often forbidden.
I absolutely treasure my ancestral Greek heritage and culture - it sounds like maybe you do too with you Indian ancestry and culture. I am friends with many Indian families, as are my kids, unlike in my childhood, where I had very little exposure to Indian Americans in my education, and when I did, in the 80s and 90s they were very much culturally excluded and a distinct minority. I remember horrible attitudes, for example a recurring episode in my elite prep school in which teenage white kids would try to knock the turban off a Sikh boy's head (with snowballs or apples), consistently, as a joke
For millions and millions of Americans whose ancestry was scrubbed of those direct connections, "People of color" is a fitting identity, one that indirectly references this stripping of more specific ancestral cultural. Live and let live bro. Peace.
If "people of color" is meant to refer exclusively to the descendants of African American slaves, that'd be interesting and highly clarifying to know. But empirically that doesn't seem to be how the phrase is used at all.
And if it's not, then I don't really understand your argument. Why invent a term to lump together groups that do and groups that don't have the specific historical experience that you claim justifies using the term to begin with?
I don't think it is exclusively a term for slave descendants either. Just perhaps a fitting term if one's ancestry has been scrubbed. And not just me saying that, but one that speaks to many people and their conception of their own identity.
Yep, that venerated, decades old civil rights organization with an enormous successful track record of promoting the "Advancement of Colored People" (a term I've quoted from the organization's title)......refers to a term that I should not use because it is "an affectation of upper class people (and not all of them at that)."
So the people I know who call themselves people of color (many of which are decidedly NOT upper class) don't actually exist because you know more Indians than me?
Did I say a word about the term latinx? It is a term I've never once used in actual conversation
As a non-white minority person of colour, I'm glad Milan wrote the <s>person experiencing metallurgy</s> steelman version of the low-effort comment I was gonna reply with. Yes indeed - do I get any say in this labeling business, or is it just for whites? Just for PMC? Is it like certain other "reclaimed" terms where only the people actually in those categories can use them without offense? (Not a show I care for, but I did appreciate "Fresh Off the Boat" for taking back a former slur.)
I do often find my values and aesthetic choices aligned with those of elites...elegance is required in all things. But fussiness around words seems like a particularly pernicious type of White Saviour Syndrome. I am reminded of that controversial term Latinx, for example. "Hey, in our grand consideration, we thought about potential ways our mental model of a person of Latin ancestry might potentially be offended, and came up with a new term for you! Aren't you grateful?" Many Such Cases. It's especially jarring cause that same mentality is also likely to emphasize Centering Voices of Colour and Lived Experience and Preferred Pronouns and _____ People Are Not A Monolith and such. Protip: we're perfectly capable of coming up with our own labels, maybe simply ask first next time?
But of course, as Matt points out, the point often __isn't__ to improve anything, let alone actual material conditions. (Which is hard! A money here, an effort there, and sooner or later you're talking about real work.) It's just status games all the way down. And the annoying thing is that - it works. Because by being alienated and complaining about such norms here, I'm self-selecting out of elite culture in a big way. They win, more pie for them. As Marx (no, the other one) would say though: I don't want to belong to a club that would accept me as a member. Cause you can't be elitist without first being elite.
Bingo. I've been watching these things spiral for 40+ years, and after a certain amount of changes in terminology it starts to sound sillier and sillier. The arguments always sound reasonable, so you nod along and wholeheartedly support them, but then 10 years later the terms that you thought sounded so great that had such reasonable arguments in support of them come under attack by new great sounding words with reasonable arguments and you start to realize that EVERY term can be attacked by people creative enough to think of problems with them. If the underlying thing you're describing is what's actually problematic then you're never going to find a word that can't be tied to the problematic aspects of what it's describing. You have to change those underlying characteristics to actually have an impact. I think it's only a matter of time before "global south" becomes a problem and disfavored ("you're implying that being born relative to a hemispherical line somehow makes people disadvantaged, so labeling people as poor/backwards due solely to the relative global position of their birth is inherently racist and centers the global north as the default and acceptable location of one's birthplace." or something similar), so at some point we all have to just agree that the words themselves are just descriptions of things and not inherently problematic. But we won't ever do that because it's not polite or acceptable, so this process is never ending.
My older brother was born with an extreme form of cerebral palsy and has been quadriplegic all his life. He's happy and his quality of life is good. Things that have made a difference: curb cuts, better wheelchairs, excellent staff in the group home where he lives. Things that have not: whether he is described as "handicapped," "disabled," or something else.
I have seen an absolutely dramatic change in attitudes regarding disabled people since my youth. I’m surprised this isn’t seen as a quality of life issue
It reminds me of how in high school in the 90s I got confused by people saying we should use “CE” instead of “AD” on the theory that the latter foregrounds religion while the former doesn’t. But you’re still basing the calendar on the supposed year of Christ’s birth! Except now, by not acknowledging what you’re doing, you’re treating it as an agreed-upon fact that this is how the calendar should go (“common era”), whereas at least AD acknowledged it as an explicitly religious distinction, one that nonreligious people can observe without believing.
I prefer CE as Jesus is not my lord, which is what you technically profess whenever you write AD, though I agree its a ridiculously minor quibble. I always tell my students that they can either use BC/AD or BCE/CE but have to be consistent. No mixing ;)
(to your point though - you can always interpret "CE" as "Christian Era" if you wish)
P.S.
CE is also easier because if you're a pedant like me you'd know that AD goes before the year and BC after, which is confusing, whereas both BCE and CE go after so it's easier and more consistent
Some of us aren't too excited by acknowledging 2023 as the "Year of the Lord 2023." You have start counting years somewhere and Jesus's birth is as good as any other, I guess. (Though we non-Christians can smugly point out that you lot got it wrong and are actually off by ~4 years.)
But if everyone wants to switch the year to 5783 we chosen folks will be fine with that. Has a real Star Trek vibe.
Sure, I can't tell you how to feel. I guess for me, the fact that we're arbitrarily going with the ~year of Christ's birth as a place to start counting means that we may as well acknowledge it, and doing so with medieval Latin distances it from anything I actually believe.
Agreed: I don't particularly like that we're using a guess of the year Jesus Christ was born as where to start counting, but I dislike the obscuring of that fact much more.
Who cares? The definition of the meter is that it's one-ten millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole along the meridian through Paris. The bland term "meter" totally obscures that origin and meaning yet I'm okay that people don't keep that origin firmly in mind when watching athletes competing in the 100 meter race (which, btw, is 1/100,000th of the distance from the equator to the North Pole).
Where "Present" is defined as "AD 1950" because that's the date that the calibration samples for radiocarbon dating were taken. This means we are currently in 73 YAP (years after present).
This reminds me of the story about the high school teacher who took his students to a dig where they saw the fossilized bones of an ancient dog embedded in the rocks. The teacher solemnly told them that the fossils were five million and twenty years old. Seeing their confusion, he explained that *his* teacher had taken his class to the same site twenty years ago and told them the bones were five million years old.
Sure. I think I've seen "BP" most frequently in the context of archeology and paleoanthropology. The human connection (we're very much still here) is perhaps why "present" is emphasized.
I think you are engaging in what Matt describes as "getting mad at language change." Yes, these terms keep changing. Yes, there is something extremely arbitrary at the end of the day about what we term offensive and what we term polite. But that's just how language works. It absolutely can get silly ("Latinx"), but if any phrase was ever ripe for retirement, it is "third world." I don't know that many people can identify what the term "second world" used to refer to. The cold war order that these terms referenced doesn't exist in any meaningful way anymore. Is China third world? Also, come on: the term actually is pretty explicitly condescending.
Isn't "South" kind of confusing as well, though? Afghanistan is about the same latitude as Ohio. Mongolia is farther north than that. Singapore is on the Equator and Uruguay is a middle income country.
Another problem with all these terms is I usually have no idea what countries are actually being referred to or often what's being attempted by the grouping. Ethiopia and Argentina and Afghanistan have very little in common with each other, for example, and I can hardly find a reason to try to put them together in some meaningful category.
I think Matt is wrong on this and getting mad at language change can be sensible, particularly when the change is top-down elitism rather than organic.
I agree, particularly when there's often a not-at-all hidden "Newspeak" agenda involved on the part of the people trying to direct the changes in language (see, e.g., gendered language in the context of trans issues).
Totally agree. I'm baffled by the logical leap from "arbitrary and always changing" to it being unreasonable to object to any particular change.
Property rights (to take just one example) are also arbitrary and always changing. Does that mean criticizing new land use restrictions is the lowest form of YIMBY politics?
There's also a huge difference between something's being arbitrary in the sense of its having been willed by nobody in particular, like the grammatical structure of English, and something's being arbitrary in the sense of the willed imposition of one individual or group's preferences on others.
Isn't his whole point here that language change isn't about some sort of normal, acceptable, or organic language change but rather about changing language to create new systems of exclusion?
If we invent new language or change current language because of new knowledge or needs (I dunno - I expect as quantum computing advances language will change in reaction to new knowledge about the universe) it is silly to be mad at that.
But language change that is designed to create new political or social groupings or offer new signal for in-groupness or out-groupness? Seems rational to be mad about that especially if you are in the new outgroup somebody is trying to create.
I think you're largely right about the political dynamics. But another way of looking at it is that when one feels one never has a seat at the table where the new language is being formulated, the neologisms' very existence, to say nothing of the expectation that one will use them, can feel like an insult and a wrong.
That is, there doesn't have to be anything intrinsically objectionable about a phrase like "developing countries"* for conservatives to feel its use as a reminder of their second-class status within the institutions that decide what the "correct" term is going to be. In which case there isn't really any civil conversation to be had about the merits of the terms themselves.
* I've never noticed much in the way of conservative ire about "developing countries" in particular -- maybe I'm just not talking to the right people -- but I'll take it as a valid token of the general phenomenon.
Is there any topic where it makes sense to just get mad and stomp your feet? Of course debating the merits of language changes is a better approach than just grousing about them, but that’s not specific to language--you’re just describing the difference between productive and unproductive discourse.
I mean, there's some pretty heavy irony there, considering that these countries weren't even slightly outside of the cold war. They often were very deeply, painfully enmeshed in the cold war as client states.
Regardless, I tend to favor "developing" as well. To the extent that any umbrella term makes sense, it seems meaningful to characterize countries by measures like their level of industrialization and per-capita GDP.
Ah, well, the Non-Aligned Movement was originally Yugoslavia, India, Egypt, Ghana and Indonesia. Most African nations were still First World, being colonies of NATO members in 1961.
The massive expansion of decolonisation and the clientelism was still in the future when the term was invented.
When I was first taught the term, it was UDCs for "under-developed countries".
But developing vs developed is a useful distinction, as long as you bear in mind that, like any simple binary, it simplifies and conceals a lot of complexity.
UCD or "developing" can be useful if you know your audience and you're all on the same page. But it's more often still fraught with danger.
Suppose MY mentioned "developing countries" in a post without much further clarification. You and I could have wildly different ideas on which countries and areas of the world that means.
I don't use the term "Third World" much because I agree that it's lost relevance since the end of the Cold War, but I would dispute that the term was "pretty explicitly condescending" -- it was coined by a French historian (Alfred Sauvy) in 1952 to describe countries that stood outside the East vs. West frame of the Cold War and, per him, was inspired by the French concept of the "Third Estate," and I think also pretty clearly influenced by the concept of the "Third Way," which was a term often used in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries to describe a path between capitalism and socialism/communism.
China was second world IIRC. And it seems to me that the "getting mad at language change" gripe is equally applicable to "getting mad at language" argument- it all depends on context. "Third world" wasn't objectionable until it was- folks had to decide that it was actually problematic. The condescension you're highlighting can be inferred if you want to, but you can just as easily infer condescension in literally any terminology that applies to as broad a group as the term is referencing. Global south doesn't strike me as inherently less condescending, it's just that the folks who infer condescension in TW have decided, for the moment, not to infer it in GS.
Personally, I'm with you in that getting upset about the changes is silly to an extent. When the purpose of the language change is to be able to easily identify undesirables or those with backwards/ignorant thinking so that we can condemn them then it can get problematic, but if we don't do that then whatever, who cares. But spending time pretending that calling a country one from the GS as opposed calling it TW makes literally any difference whatsoever to the world and lived experiences of anyone living in it strikes me as pretty silly.
On the other hand, "Global South" was an inaccurate term the day it was coined since it excludes literal Australia, the continent named for being Southerly!
(I actually sympathize with the idea that First / Second / Third world had technical connotations specific to the Cold War that are worth preserving for the sake of precision, but the general point that we as a society stopped using "Third World" for aggravating euphemism treadmill reasons instead of meritorious reasons of technical precision is reasonably self-evident. On the other hand, at least developing / developed nation status allows for granularity based on the metrics that people are actually referring to when they use these terms, so I'll give that terminology a bye.)
How are you defining problematic? As someone who was alive in the 90s, I can say that I never once heard anyone claim it was "problematic" once the wall came down, at least not in the way that term seems to be being used in this context. I think it's fair to say we should stop using it because it's not an accurate term anymore post-cold war, but that's different than claiming it's condescending or insulting in some way that GS isn't.
Yeah, the inaccuracy thing was the reason I stopped using it in the 1990s.
It’s weird to call developing countries “third world” when it includes Soviet Bloc nations! This was a useful affectation in debate class, since it made me look smarter and more thoughtful. And more pedantic.
Honestly, it was a language choice that gave you everything you could ever want in HS debate.
This is maybe the best explanation for my "third-world" should reasonably be deprecated in favor of "the global south", so thanks! So much so, in fact, that I'm not sure you really need the final sentence. Condescension is a matter of felt implication, and not, I think, necessarily inherent in the concatenation of "third" and "world", ipso facto. Honestly the first time I heard the term when I was young I thought it just meant "Earth", since there's Mercury and Venus before us.
It's true that the term is defunct on the merits, but I think it would be disingenuous to ignore the implied (?) hierarchy in the term. Some terms change over time simply because they become dated or acquire associations (colored, Afro-American, African American, Black), and it's hard to argue that the phrases are inherently distasteful. But third world? Eh, I'm pretty sure India didn't come up with that one.
Except we do need hierarchies! Certainly the term lost some of its utility after the end of the Cold War, but I still think it’s useful to distinguish , strong , competent , but evil regimes (China) from failed states (Somalia) and both from good (politically free, socially stable, economically prosperous) countries (Sweden). I don’t think we need to apologize for creating terms reflecting these value judgments. I do agree though that we might need something more up to date than third world.
“Third world” describes a set of conditions that are bad and, so, come to have deeply negative meanings its elites would like to avoid.
So a new word is devised which soon, because it is a word for something negative, gathers the same baggage and becomes unacceptable as well.
The baggage itself is, taking from Matt’s piece, mostly that people at least kind of agree that it takes centuries to make a gentleman. Your doctor who came from moderate means in a country of few would like to portray themselves as inheriting something glorious, not as the son of a grain dealer who was prosperous for a place where many people don’t have whatever basic thing it would be comically embarrassing to lack.
After all, this is America and most people here see that kind of story as creating authenticity. But that whole concept seems to be more for college admissions essays these days.
Why can't we just give everyone the benefit of the doubt? After all, just conversing about these issues indicates a willingness to learn in most cases. As for those who intentionally use racist language to display actual racist attitudes, well, Jesus said "love your neighbor."
I'm not convinced that judging people for attitudes has that much to do with addressing systemic racism baked into laws, lending algorithms, employment traditions etc. For example, it's probably more effective to formally discipline employees who harass their female colleagues and use racist language with the intent of offending fellow employees, then to try to convince or shame people into changing their internal biases and attitudes.
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).
If white, moneyed neighborhoods had the level of violence that law abiding citizens are surrounded by in poor, black neighborhoods, then we would accept fascism as an alternative. An actual police state, whatever it took to make it stop. It really is horrifying.
The black property owners in Clayton County, Georgia agree, and keep electing Victor Hill to the shirerevalty so the Clayton County Jail can remain “America’s toughest military prison.”
The word was originally shire-reeve (well, it was scirgerefa, but the modern words "shire" - ie county, and "reeve" - ie government official, come from scir and gerefa).
As is often true in English, odd spellings and pronunciations make more sense if you know the etymology.
Richard Hanania and others (and as Matt kind of has here) have similarly framed these types of beliefs and behaviors as a form of status competition between elites to see who can understand the most vanguard-y terms, ideas, etc.
It’s also a way of laundering class privilege. You can say “I sent my child to a progressive school that had a diverse class” and leave out the fact that poor whites need not apply
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.
I think the point is that people whose job is to think about this stuff have strong incentives to innovate and make novel contributions to the field. But that quest for novelty becomes stressful and difficult to others down the food chain.
It seems like this arms race to innovate could eventually come crashing down in discrediting manners when the people they're trying to innovate on behalf of strongly reject the innovation. Something that's even stronger than, say, Ruben Gallego's famous rejection of Latinx.
I think you’re in part right. You’re saying this is mostly organic. But there is a part of it that’s deliberate. I was in a DEI training (mandatory) and the trainer said we no longer say ally we now say something else. It apparently didn’t catch one. But one of my woke colleagues (she was really focused on trans issues) thought it was so great. I thought it was the same thing using different words. The point is people feel like they’re making a contribution by changing these words. It’s become a thing onto itself. Most of my liberal colleagues have gotten to the point where it’s annoying. We literally laugh about it. You now shouldn’t say master plan. In my work, this is common. Purging it takes real effort. Does it really do anything?
But the DEI folks have to do something. The managers have 6 figure salaries and offices...they can’t say well we did what we could... I guess we’re done now. They want to stay employed. As Matt just said there is quickly diminishing returns to where your efforts are increasingly meaningless.
We should re-train the DEI workers as home builders. A case could be made that many more homes would do more for their stated goals than “the work” (as they love to call it), than what they do now.
Yes I think that is the idea, more than just a friend but someone who is willing to break unjust rules and cause “good trouble.” It’s all just play-acting… Jeff Maurer had a fantastic piece on this a while back but sadly I can’t find it :(
I first noticed this with "microaggression," but I think it's interesting every time, especially because it tends to accompany a flattening of the definition that eliminates the nuance that the term was originally meant to have. I think this is just an inevitable part of mass use, but it's just particularly striking when it comes to concepts that were originally meant to have a very specific meaning.
Yeah I agree with this. In general I feel like etiquette operates at the individual and small group level, and to an extent within corporate structures, while oppression is an extensive set of systems. Is misgendering someone repeatedly/deliberately when you know better really a "microaggression"? Like you say I think that flattens the meaning and usefulness.
Shouldn't we have harsh words for harsh realities? Slavery isn't a unique cultural experience, it's brutal forced labor for economic gain. It's dehumanizing and that's the point. Sanitizing the language is a bit to close to sanitizing history.
This is way too much clumsy messing with language. You don't have to fully flesh out the potential ramifications of every word while using the word. That's what sentences, with adjectives, etc. are for.
Should there be a new word for casualties of war that fully describes the horrific physical and mental injuries suffered? If I say 800,000 soldiers died in civil war or 20,000 died in the revolution is that sanitizing history? Should we say instead: "20,000 persons who's bodies suffered traumatic injuries sufficient to produce death, or whose camp conditions facilitated the spread of diseases which cause them to suffer agonizing deaths in mental and physical pain as their bowels leaked and / or brain functions deteriorated"
Should there be a new word for serfs who were forced by law to live and work on the land of their masters, often resulting in starvation? "Persons held in serfdom" is that better ( for some reason? )
Ha, yes, I've brought up the "enserfed person" question at Slate before on this topic. There are literally hundreds of words you can do this with and I can't begin to understand how anyone thinks it's actually helping anything as compared to just sounding like more and more bureaucrat-ese.
That’s exactly the point. Calling someone a “slave” sanitizes it, while saying they “were enslaved” makes clear that there was a harsh and continuing process involved in keeping them enslaved.
I have literally a 100% opposite view -- calling someone a "slave" sounds harsh and jarring; calling someone an "enslaved person" is mushmouthed euphemism treadmill stuff.
This goal of "packing punch" through word definitions is a horrible goal and progressives are constantly wasting everyone's time with it.
The point of words, and the natural tendency of their evolution, is to carry a useful bit of information. You know what the word slave means, I know what the word slaves mean thus we can communicate. If it's useful in the context to explain more about the slave experience, or emphasize its horribleness - than write more sentences!
By analogy - we both know what kidnapping is. Now suppose one of use had been kidnapped or our child had been. The word "kidnapping" by itself, probably does little justice to how psychologically scarring that experience would have been. But if we needed to get the across, the proper remedy is not to invent a better euphemism - it's just to describe the experience.
"This goal of 'packing punch' through word definitions is a horrible goal and progressives are constantly wasting everyone's time with it."
I don't personally have that as a goal. My point is simply that the only justification I've seen given for "enslaved person" is that it is supposedly more "powerful" because it uses the word "person" in it. [Insert 5000 word essay on "person-centered language" here.] I find that completely unconvincing -- if the goal is to jar, shock, etc. the listener, the word "slave" does that. "Enslaved person" says to me, "Here's a PowerPoint."
Unfortunately it's taking over wikipedia articles on Slavery in the United States. I'm on a civil war history kick right now, and I'm seeing the awkward "enslaved person" about 60% or so.
I did say ‘in certain contexts’ for a reason. I agree in your example the change is completely worse! I don’t think the change should be a rule, it’s just a better frame in a small number of settings/discussions/circumstances.
Really, calling someone a slave sanitizes it? As a person with some libertarian views on freedom, I find it hard to see how the word slave can be sanitized.
Maybe there is some advanced rhetorical thinking that my mind just can’t process. This feels like Eric Weinstein mathematics applied to vocabulary.
Yes. It completely erases the role of the people who were doing the enslaving. It’s the kind of thing that people who complain about the passive voice are actually complaining about. (The passive voice is actually used in this example to emphasize that this is a transitive verb.)
It erases the role of the enslavers? You really believe that's accurate?
Again - this is not how language works. You're using "erase" as an active verb. If I say I am an amputee, that doesn't "erase the role of whatever took my limb". It's merely an accurate description of my condition, awaiting further clarification (how? which limb? when? who?) or description or blame.
And of course most people of normal intelligence know my arm didn't fall of one day while I was walking down the street, just as anyone with 2 brain cells knows a slave, by definition, is "owned" by another person. "Enslaved person" gives no further information, it's exactly the kind of shibboleth Matt wrote about in today's post.
I’m with Wigan here. When I read the word slave - I don’t assume that is a state that occurred without a cause. I think RC hit on the motivation for using this language better than this take.
I think that, in the modern parlance, the difference is that 'enslaved peoples' usually means 'black people who were enslaved by white people', while 'slave' is a generic term for the condition of enslavement. i.e., the latter was a common condition throughout history, while the former is central to the ongoing discussion-argument-debate over the history and founding of the United States. So, in that context, 'slave' is sanitizing because it is a broader category, sort of like the difference between 'violent crime' and 'murder'.
"the difference is that 'enslaved peoples' usually means 'black people who were enslaved by white people', while 'slave' is a generic term for the condition of enslavement."
Is that a distinction that's being drawn by the terms? While I've certainly seen the argument that slavery as practiced in the US was uniquely bad (which I think is disputable in a number of ways), I've never seen someone use different terminology like that, which seems like it would be problematic in its own way as dehumanizing non-black slaves.
I don't know that the lexicon is that rigorous, but I do think that there is a pattern of adopting phrasing that highlights the oppressor/oppressed dynamic, like describing any unequal power relationship as a subset of 'white supremacy'. I do know from personal experience that the kind of people who adopt this lexicon tend to dismiss the notion that slavery isn't 'real' unless it fits that dynamic, ipso facto the blanket descriptor 'slavery' is sanitized language.
Slavery was so common throughout human history that even my Southern European ancestors were enslaved as late as the late 18th-early 18th century. Some historians argue that the resulting centuries of economic depression were a contributing factor in the eventual mass emigration from the region that brought my antecedents to the US. But since we are now considered white, discussing this form of slavery is considered a right-wing talking point meant only to minimize the trauma of the African slave trade. And, fair enough, the book I read on the topic was reviewed by National Review (but written by a history professor who studies the topic); it's not a collective trauma shared by an ethnic group; it never reached the scale of the African slave trade, which was a particularly brutal, international and financialized era of slavery; and my antecedents are retroactively considered capital W-white, which redounds to my benefit.
Interesting, do this a kind of centering a specific group. The logic then becomes if that group is not centered than sanitation is occurring. This is consistent with acknowledging many groups having had enslaved peoples is bad because we should stay focused on a specific group. Okay, I see how the word sanitized is being used. I still don’t agree with that view but at least I understand now.
I think that's right. A counter example is 'patriarchy', which is unambiguous with respect to the two groups; men oppressing women. (Of course, in woke-speak it has a much less precise, more complex and shifting definition and somehow also involves race now.) In this context 'sanitizing' means 'phrased in a way that does not incriminate (a specific group)'.
No, it doesn't sanitizes it, it's the noun that defines what that person was in the society they lived in. That's what language is for and how it works. We don't need to replace existing nouns with clumsy euphemisms to describe slavery. Instead you can, you know, describe slavery. It's like what I hear other parents tell their toddlers "use your words"
Does using the term "the holocaust" sanitize the Holocaust? Does using the word "genocide" sanitize things - do we need to replace "the Armenian Genocide" with "the communal murder and rape and terrorizing of more than 1.5 million Armenians" to de-sanitize it?
The point I was making was that in some contexts it can be more insightful to say ‘X enslaved people’ and some makes no difference compared to ‘had slaves’. I don’t think the word ‘slaves’ is too harsh or anything like that.
I was then extrapolating to say -particularly within certain institutions- that one might imagine how ‘sometimes enslaved is a better way to express this in some work’ becomes ‘we use the word enslaved here’ and then becomes ‘don’t say slave’ through a combination of repetition and people getting things slightly wrong.
I agree that ‘person experiencing homeless’ does nothing very useful.
The point I was making was that in some contexts it can be more insightful to say ‘X enslaved people’ and some makes no difference compared to ‘had slaves’. I don’t think the word ‘slaves’ is too harsh or anything like that.
I was then extrapolating to say -particularly within certain institutions- that one might imagine how ‘sometimes enslaved is a better way to express this in some work’ becomes ‘we use the word enslaved here’ and then becomes ‘don’t say slave’ through a combination of repetition and people getting things slightly wrong.
I agree that ‘person experiencing homeless’ does nothing very useful.
Richard C helpfully linked this below, but I'm reposting here because it's so well-written and better says what I was trying to say in my several comments here.
> 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.
I think that between "Thomas Jefferson owned over 600 slaves" and "Thomas Jefferson enslaved over 600 people", the latter makes a considerably stronger statement.
The latter is also misleading, because it implies he made 600 free people into slaves, which is what "enslaved" usually means as a transitive verb (I just checked a bunch of online dictionaries: some allow "hold someone in bondage" as a secondary meaning, but all give "force someone into bondage" as the primary meaning). I see from https://www.monticello.org/slavery/slavery-faqs/property/ that he inherited 175 slaves, bought another ~20, and acquired the rest from "the natural increase of enslaved families". At the time it was the law of Virginia that the children of enslaved women were born into slavery, so I think it's misleading even to say that Jefferson enslaved the remaining 400. "Jefferson owned over 600 enslaved people", though inelegant, is at least accurate and non-misleading.
You are overestimating median practitioners eloquence. It’s more likely to be “Jefferson owned 600 enslaved-persons” and going to sound stupid and pc. But yes- yours is the better way to go about it, although I’d argue both frames are actually correct and useful. He did own slaves and that allowed to a legal-historical relaity that enslaving peole glosses over somewhat.
Yes the historical use of the word slaves in documents at the time is important. I also think "he enslaved people" is less true of Jefferson to my knowledge than of, say, Columbus. By the time Jefferson or his father or whoever bought them they were already enslaved, unless they were born at Monticello in which case they never experienced any other condition. I don't necessarily find the word "own" in this context very exculpatory but it is interesting to realize that some people might.
Good point ! I’d rather think “own”’is (or ought to be!) jarring when referring to people. All in all I think that between the two sentences while Gadsden’s might be more likely to start a debate (which is certainly a good thing in some cases!), the original one actually states the case with greater clarity and historical precision.
I absolutely agree that treating it as a shibboleth is just silly. The point, I think (and the original one a couple of comments ago) is that the way I put it rephrases it in a striking way that, because it's non-standard, makes the listener stop and think more.
By turning that into a standard phrasing that is used all the time without thought, you defeat the actual point of what the originators were trying to do.
Strong agree with exactly this point. The interesting reframing encounters the urge from certain quarters to ensure one is broadcasting that they are sensitive and caring to these things and turns it to mush.
The only way the latter makes a stronger statement is insofar as it implies an assertion that is empirically false. Once people come to understand that by [B] you just mean [A], whatever extra rhetorical force [B] had will be lost.
I think to highlight that one person *owns* another person packs a significant punch as well. I'm not sure one version so clearly out-performs the other.
As a descendant of slaves I think it's interesting to discuss it and to think about the dehumanizing potential of the word "slaves" but extremely boring and at best low-hanging fruit to go around yelling at slightly less educated or well read people ESPECIALLY other black people not to say the word "slave" anymore. Like in its secondary context I think it's intended as a remedy for dehumanization and I think it fails in that similarly to phrases like "person with autism" that are now not really used in-community. I felt this way about "African-American" as a child- not bc there was anything wrong with the word but because I could sense the effort of older white people to remember the "better" word. I couldn't articulate why it bothered me; today I tend to bring up my Caribbean heritage and that there's nothing wrong with being Black but really it's just a gut feeling that racism isn't about being mean and impolite.
I agree, and would add also a second point you may allude to: that this has the danger of venturing into the realm of euphemism. This of course is more problematic when used for positive or neutral terms (someone’s heritage) but can be problematic even for negative terms for the fear of sanitizing history. Slavery *was* the ultimate form of dehumanization, and there is no way of changing that blight on our history. I think we need to strike the tricky balance between talking about then history in a way that recalls- indeed emphasizes - the humanity of the enslaved and the injustice they incurred- on one hand but on the other not to shy way form precise sharp historical terms describing the situation in its exact horror. I thus think master/slaves shouldn’t be shunned altogether but used with care and within context.
Yes I agree completely. I also think it presents different problems for different groups of readers. Within black communities I think it's much less common to have forgotten that the people in all the paintings and daguerreotypes who look like you and your family were people, and.the history of Jim Crow is still close enough generationally that these things don't feel theoretical. Like most things it's more complex than just memorizing current etiquette haha. I like the way you explained that aspect because it is part of what I was trying to get at.
I have a hard time seeing how substituting "enslaved people" for "slaves" is anything other than an absolute loss in accuracy and precision. That is, I don't see it as a matter of context: I can't imagine any context in which that would be an "interesting reframing" and not just an addition of, at best, unnecessary linguistic ambiguity.
To take an example discussed elsewhere in this comment thread, suppose we said of Thomas Jefferson that he "owned X many enslaved people" or even that he "enslaved X many people." The first is unclear as to whether it refers only to people who became slaves during their lifetime, or is instead meant to include people born into slavery as well -- about whom it's confusing to say they were "enslaved," since there was never a time when they didn't have the juridical status of slaves.
The second -- that Jefferson "enslaved" X many people -- is clearly even worse. If Jefferson acquired some slaves by purchase, then they were already enslaved as a matter of the positive law of that time and place. If the idea is that Jefferson could've freed them but didn't, the only way he could've acquired the ability to do such a thing is if the seller had the power to transfer his or her property rights in them to Jefferson -- which again presupposes their having already been slaves in a positive-law sense.
If the point is that they were never truly slaves because as a matter of natural law (or, as we now tend to say, human rights) no human being can be the property of another, then by the same logic they were never truly "enslaved" either.
So I guess I don't see what exactly the reframing is meant to accomplish.
I also am incapable of understanding the point. Doesn't slaves literally just mean "enslaved people"? If the point of the parent comment was to subtly point out how useless DEI practitioners are, well they accomplished it.
Isn't a major part of the issue that someone -- very often the AP Style Guide -- does consciously decree that? E.g., the overnight flip in many publications to capitalizing "Black," but not "white" when describing racial groups?
This happens in many fields, in different shapes and fashions. The Harvard Business Review has kept itself relevant by every three or four years sponsoring the hot new catchphrase or One Weird Trick for reinventing your business. These come from huckster consultant types who float the New Think in an article and after that a hot new book that all CEOs and their acolytes have to read and seed their conversation with lest they seem out of touch and ripe for their board to consider replacing.
And, of course, there's never any real substance behind it. That would take actual, honest work, which these hucksters aren't too keen on.
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.
I may be a party of one on this, but I've always felt a bit of regret at the loss of "he" to refer to the third person singular of non-defined gender. My understanding is the use of "they" in this case has a long pedigree in English, and was probably becoming more common long before gender politics weighed in. But still, for quite some time—at least well into the 1970s I think — "he" was acceptable (and indeed preferred) as the standard in formal English. Its loss in my view is one that makes the language ever so slightly less elegant.
But relatedly, if everyone was aware that "he" could refer to either a male or female (yes, one is aware in 2023 people don't always self-label themselves with one of these two choices), where was the sexism. To put it another way, if everyone knows "he" is used to refer to either gender by convention, it's doesn't exclude women. So what's sexist about it?
Also relatedly, I've long thought a nice compromise would be for people to simply choose whichever third person singular pronoun they prefer or personally use; or mix it up; but just don't banish "he" — it was economical and made sense. But that ship has mostly sailed, at least in on the western side of the Atlantic. I often use "she" now as my default because I know I won't catch flack, and because "they" grates.
As a woman, I don’t like gender-neutral “he” - even as a small child, it made me feel as if I wasn’t meant to envision myself, a girl, as whomever “he” was. It’s never felt gender-neutral and I know I’m not the only woman who feels that way. I’ve spent my life telling people I’m a she, not a he, and the people of the world spend a lot of time telling me I’m a she, not a he - why would a single grammatical exception except that? I would sacrifice “elegance” for that. In fact, as a reader, to me the gender-neutral “he” isn’t elegant - it’s jarring and suggests that whatever was written was written anticipating a male reader, even if it’s technically for everyone.
I recommend you explore the concept of “male as default” that feminists discuss. The slow elimination of gender-neutral “he” is a product of pushing against that. It’s not the largest problem, for sure (things like car safety mechanisms being calibrated for the height and weight of the average male despite being more unsafe for the average female, for example) - but it’s downhill from that.
This is actually a perfect example of why being more "inclusive" has real merit. Thank you for this.
A lot of this substack is oriented towards pushing back on the most obnoxious parts of more left wing overreach regarding language and DEI, a lot of which I agree with.
But your post is good pushback that a lot of the impetus (if not the actual work by people like Robin DeAngelo) has real merit; there really is good reason(s) to be more inclusive even if it seems like something supposedly small like the usage of the word "he'.
When a text uses "she" where someone 20 years ago would have used "he" (as a "gender-neutral" term) I find it jarring, so I find it easy to believe that the inverse (the default "he") feels jarring to women.
(And my young daughter has expressed frustration that so much defaults to 'he' so it's definitely not just 'woke elites')
My young daughters are the same and as a parent I understand the frustration.
We were reading Goodnight, Goodnight Construction Site and every single construction vehicle is a "he", for no good reason. (Are we going to pretend the female Dump Trucks are all homemakers or...what?)
Interestingly, I'm guessing the authors received a lot of feedback on that because their next book, Steam Train Dream Train is completely gender-free. That is, gender is never mentioned.
>>it’s jarring and suggests that whatever was written was written anticipating a male reader
Not to me it doesn't. But I think it's fine for different people to possess different aesthetics. As I wrote above, my usual default is "she" — it avoids triggering people, and it likewise avoids the clunkiness of using a form that evolved to denote the plural as a singular.
Could be. I've noticed this use of "she" has grown quite popular. Matt frequently employs it (though I noticed—gasp!—our host used "he" in this capacity recently).
It’s also just weird that English doesn’t have a gender-neutral singular pronoun. Plenty of other languages do.
The only other language I speak is Swahili. I love how I can tell a whole story about a person in swahili without giving away their gender. And it feels totally natural - I don’t miss it at all.
English does have a gender-neutral singular pronoun: "it." But people normally don't use it for humans. We use that word for squirrels, birds, trees, etc.
"They" is the older term for people of indeterminate gender; the insistence on "he" is one of those cases where grammarians of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries pushed for Latinate grammar rules whose reasoning really derives from elements structure of the Latin language (like "prepositions don't end sentences" and "no split infinitives") that don't exist in English.
One of the sillinesses of the arguments over "they" is that singular they for a person of indeterminate gender is genuinely ancient (and appears in Shakespeare and the King James Bible and so on), but singular they for a specific person whose determinate gender is non-binary is very modern and is a genuine innovation. People objecting to the innovation as "singular they" get the Shakespeare quotes thrown at them and know they are different but can't express how because they lack the grammatical language to express it. Most of the people defending personal they also don't realise that it's an actual novelty and think it's the same as the old indeterminate singular they.
Personally: I'd prefer it if we adopted two new singular personal pronouns, one for indeterminate gender and one for known non-binary gender. But innovating one personal pronoun was last done during the Viking invasions in the 800s AD, so it's not likely to happen.
I do wonder how long it'll be before "they all" starts cropping up to emphasise the plurality of they.
"Personally: I'd prefer it if we adopted two new singular personal pronouns, one for indeterminate gender and one for known non-binary gender."
We already have a pronoun for objects known to exhibit neither male nor female characteristics: "it". I think it's pretty obvious why non-binary personages don't ask for that pronoun.
I was taught at school (in the 1980s) that English has four grammatical genders: masculine, feminine, neuter and common. It has only three singular third-person pronouns (he, she and it), meaning that for anything in common gender, you had to use "he or she" or "s/he", but you should generally use a circumlocution to avoid the pronoun (passive voice, or pluralise). Also that "they" would be acceptable in some circumstances, but not in the highest levels of published writing.
"Common", as my teacher had it, is what I was referring to as "indeterminate gender" above. Neuter is only to be used for non-human objects (and, it is more respectful to use "he" or "she" for animals when the gender is known, but you don't have to respect an animal, while you do have to respect a human).
>>one of those cases where grammarians of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries pushed for Latinate grammar rules<<
Quite right. Same for the "rule" against a phrase like "Bob and me are in the kitchen." Thanks for pointing this out. But sometimes those old classicists had a point. For the record I'm about as far from a restrictionist on matters related to the English language as one can be, I think. My preference for using the 3rd person singular (of either gender) over "they" is purely aesthetic in nature.
In some other languages, where grammatical gender has less to do with personal identity (“das Mädchen”, “der Mensch” is masculine, and “die junge Frau” is feminine, and all can refer to the same person) it’s much easier to hear this as a pure syntactic feature. But in English, the pronoun almost always gets its gender from the referent, and not from the prior word that it is anaphoric on.
This has been a gradual process. It wasn’t as strongly established in Early Modern English. I once found a recipe for “cock ale” (btw, one supposed etymology for the word “cocktail”) that began “Take a cock and boil him in ale.” Contemporary English speakers would never refer to food with a non-neuter gendered pronoun, but at that time the word was gendered so the pronoun would be.
I've always found the default he bad for the reasons Lisa C said, and at the same time find the singular they grating, as you do, despite Richard's contrary points. Though I do agree with Richard that we need to invent some new pronouns, and it's a damn shame that we probably won't be able to agree on what those are.
I'll be 50 in a couple of months and I find personal singular they grates, even as I have friends who use it now. Indeterminate singular they seems more natural than indeterminate singular he to me, though.
My guess is that we invent a new plural third person pronoun, probably "they all" on the model of "you all" and come to reserve "they" for exclusively singular uses.
Yes, I can somewhat swallow the indeterminate case, although I try really hard to either pluralize the indeterminate example, or avoid pronouns altogether. But the personal case is really bad, especially when it's always followed by using plural conjugations of be. Start saying they is, and there might be a way to get to some compromise.
I'm sure you'll be "happy" to know the process is still ongoing, with lots of new targets!
Like you I have mixed feelings: I think in general even software developers should be thoughtful about language, but Matt's thesis is mostly right they in practice it serves as a way to separate those who are in the know from the rest of us.
I think it's perfectly reasonable for folks to avoid using "master/slave" for identifying servers, and in the context of servers "primary/replica" is probably not *too* snooty. And changing black/whitelist to block/allowlist actually feels a lot more legible to me. What strikes me is that both of those actually replace a term with something clearer that doesn't rely on an allusion to slavery (I don't actually know the etymology behind either the examples I gave but reading them as problematic feels pretty reasonable)
I haven’t looked it up but I don’t think think blacklist / whitelist has anything to do with slavery, it’s more akin to the idea of a “black mark” as being a demerit, and then whitelist is just a back-formation from “blacklist” because we needed a less awkward term than “inverse blacklist.”
Right, but I think that's kinda my point: the block/allow is clearer in the context it's being used and doesn't rely on being familiar with the allusion, thus removing one particular avenue for confusion, so seems a reasonable shift to me?
Like contrived example, say the person who popularized that in software was really into signal processing and decided to allude to high-pass/low-pass filters instead. You'd have to remember arbitrarily which term was which. That's what black/white list does, and so the idea that "black means bad and white means good" is the heuristic we're choosing to reinforce is something I can at least see bothering someone. Changing to language that is *more clear* feels like a reasonable thing to do on the merits.
Changing branch names in the repo from "master" to "main" is one I'm far more ambivalent about, though, or at least make them more descriptive (develop/testing/release, etc).
That’s probably true, but it’s still clearer to say “blocklist” and “allowlist” for users who might not know whether a “black mark” or a “white mark” is the good one. (Users may soon be as likely to be from China or Africa as the United States.)
I'm not saying that "blocklist" and "allowlist" are bad terminology per se, but I think there's a case to be made here that native speakers of English (both technical and lay) are allowed to retain their idioms.
Blacklist and whitelist are references to light - a blacklist blocks everything (which is how we get the color black), while a whitelist lets things through (white light is all of the colors combined).
The most important language skills that coders should have is to write code that is highly descriptive, so that any people that have no experience with the code you've written can easily understand it if they need or want to work on it.
This is somewhat language-dependent though. Descriptive variable and function names are great, but it's *really hard* to make anything involving pointers intuitively clear. There's a lot to be said for comments.
This is correct, there's always limits to some aspects, and while I'm a fan of concise usage of comments they are very much part of writing highly descriptive code.
I joked (but maybe wasn't joking) once on Twitter that if I had to list my 10 most significant lines of code in my professional career, at least half of them are comments explaining in some form that "No, what you're thinking about doing looking at this will not work and yes, you will regret it if you try to do it" or "This sections offends my sensibilities, too, but _do not touch it or else_"
As someone else who has been involved in those discussions, I'm glad you pushed for them, and I think you should feel more positive about your role.
I think the biggest reason that things have moved on in potentially unhelpful directions is that we haven't succeeded in making real change in how inclusive our communities are. In the face of that failure, people are going to keep trying things, even if they aren't helpful.
Tangential query: Is the caller in this context the invoking thread or process or a person using an API? I feel like I would usually use “it” (or maybe “they” if I need to personify the caller for some reason) by default in these cases, so much so that I would generally view references to “he” as most likely the contribution of ESL speakers. (I noticed when I worked in engineering with various people from different primary linguistic backgrounds that they would often use “this guy” to refer to things that lacked natural gender for which they wanted a temporary referent, which never stopped being slightly bemusing…)
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.
It's absolutely middle class, in that the upper class doesn't care so much. The British upper class would be equally comfortable with "the heads are in the stern", "lavatories are in the rear" or "the toilets are in the back" (restroom is an Americanism, so I switched to the British equivalent). An actual working-class vulgarism ("the shitter is up back") would be unacceptable, though.
This is not to say there aren't matters of manners or etiquette that the upper-class cares enormously about and that are different from the middle-class. It's just that they are different ones from the ones that the middle-class obsesses about.
Lots of rural country stuff. Like it's inappropriate to wear an entirely new outfit in the country; you're supposed to have had your Barbour jacket and Hunter wellies for years. Of course, you occasionally need to replace something, so you might be wearing one new item, but all new is a bit gauche, isn't it?
[If you're wondering why the British upper-class hates Meghan Markle so much, a large part of it is that she didn't give a shit about most of this kind of nonsense. Another large part is their racism, of course. Kate "doors to manual" Middleton got similar snobbery, but she submitted to it and learned to come up to their standards]
Obviously, Her Royal Highness, the Princess of Wales is upper class now.
Her parents were a flight dispatcher and a flight attendant. When she was five, they founded a mail order company that (eventually) made them multi-millionaires. Her father comes from an upper-class family (he had a trust fund and inheritance, but not enough to live off without working), but her mother's family were coal miners (her grandfather was a trucker, but his father worked in the pit)
"Doors to manual" (a flight attendant reference) was something that was said behind Kate's back a lot by upper-class acquaintances of William when they first started dating (they appear to have stopped since the marriage).
They had money and sent all their children to Marlborough (a public boarding school, one of the first to become fully co-educational in 1989).
By the usual British standards, Kate's parents are upper-middle (you can't get higher than that with just money), she was (before marriage) arguably upper-class as she had an upper-class education* and has inherited wealth, but if so, she's first generation and isn't fully accepted. If she'd married a "normal" upper-class man, then their children would have been entirely upper-class. Obviously, she married William which changes the calculation - as Princess of Wales, she sets upper-class manners and fashions, rather than following them.
*Marlborough and St Andrews is about as upper-class as it gets for a woman of her age who isn't academic enough to get into Oxbridge. A man of similar academic talent, such as her husband, might have Eton and St Andrews instead. One with higher academic ability would, presumably, go to Oxbridge. At these rarefied levels of society, you don't say "Eton and Cambridge", but "Eton and King's", indicating the college you attended and assuming that people know which colleges are at which university (there are seven names that are used by colleges at both, so you'd say "Trinity Oxford" and write "Trinity, Oxon.")
I think the switch to "flight attendant" needs to be looked at not just as moving to non-gendered language but also the rise of inflated sounding titles (e.g., "sanitation engineer") that I believe was going on at the same time.
I think the rise of non-gendered work category terms has been a very welcome development: police officer, firefighter, chair (or even chairperson), and so on. Nothing wrong with "flight attendant." Is it inflated sounding or just the term for the person who attends your needs during a flight?
And does anyone actually use the term "sanitation engineer"?
I didn't say the switch wasn't a welcome development, I just was observing that the reason why there was a move towards an entirely new term rather than just "universalizing" the traditionally male term (which was done with some other words, e.g., "aviator" versus "aviatrix") seems related to a trend that happened with many job titles from the late 1960s to 1980s that went beyond just eliminating gendered terminology. I don't know if anyone actually uses "sanitation engineer" (I referenced it because it's probably the most widely derided example) but I absolutely get rung up by a "sales assistant" or "sales associate" at the store, not a "clerk" or "cashier."
Yes, that's a very good point too. I first picked up on this as a kid watching the second Tim Burton Batman movie, when Selina Kyle was being persnickety of wanting to be called an executive assistant instead of a secretary.
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
I agree completely except I would amend one word here. It’s not an “intellectually dominant class” but a “materially dominant class”. They wear those terms like they wear the latest fashion. Doesn’t make them intellectuals anymore more than fashion designers (and in both cases - it seems to me - they tend to prefer the showy and noisy to that which shows good sense and good taste)
Are you sure? Are the Waltons woke? Is Bezos? Musk? How about oil company executives? Further down the hierarchy, provincial one percenters are rarely woke: they include country urologists, owners of auto dealerships and chains of fast food restaurants.
I think your idea of the materially dominant class might suffer from urban provincialism. Yes, the rich people and one percenters in NY, SF and even Chicago skew woke, but that’s only a smallish minority of the American upper class.
Perhaps oil companies are holdouts but I live in a poor flyover state and even local rich people are generally woke. 100% of high earning professionals are left wing and a large percentage of business owners as well. For example, most doctors graduating today are women and educated white women are statistically the most left wing group in our society. The reason is that you will lose your job in any large corporation for not being woke enough.
The only people who can still be right-wing and economically successful are the owners of blue collar businesses like plumbing and HVAC.
Idk. I wouldn’t be surprised if all their kids are quite woke and go to schools that preach wokeness. But maybe “cultural elite” is a better term. But with all due respect, very few journalists and politicians and close to no entertainment celebrities qualify as “intellectual” by any stretch.
Somebody wrote a book about why we might want to get mad about language change... oh yeah 1984 Newspeak. It is doubleplusungood to not worry about language change if the effect of the language change is to better limit or provoke speech to achieve a goal you disagree with.
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...
Which is why the rise in admin connects with rise in dei and fall of the sat. Because after ww2 we used to believe in trying to get the most talented and hard working of whatever background and consciously trying to dismantle class as a criterion for acceptance into elite institutions. Now it’s all regressive dramatically and people don’t fully realize it.
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.
Not long ago I had a medical procedure done when I was visiting home (Boston, MA). This was a big teaching hospital within city limits. The receptionist who signed me in — a stout, working class woman in, I'd say, her late 50s, greeted me (naturally a perfect stranger) with an extremely cheerful and utterly unselfconscious: "Hi daahlin howah you?"
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.
Is it metastasizing though? I'm still skeptical about how much staying power a lot of wokeness lingo has. Most people who subscribe to Matt's blog probably know what BIPOC means, or have become aware that "enslaved person" is now often preferred over "slave" — and so on. But what's the percentage of the general population? Some of it will stick, for sure (at one point "Ms" was used solely by the woke of that era). But not all of it will. My sense (to cite one example) is that "Black" has made a nice comeback (upper case, to be sure) ands "African-America" — which seemed very strongly preferred only ten years ago, is in retreat. I'm skeptical "queer" will really replace "gay" — although I guess we'll find out at some point.
I figure the English language has a way of taking care of itself. That which isn't useful—which doesn't fill a niche that needed filling—tends to fade away despite the best efforts of influential people. "Groovy" and "gnarly" mercifully went away, because we already had "cool."
Agreed. Language development is actually one of our most democratic institutions. Elites can propose and try to mandate linguistic changes but if they're not picked up by a broader public, they die.
Yeah I had written another paragraph that I cut out for the sake of pithiness...the upshot was: I acknowledge language evolves, and yes, you’re spitting into the wind by trying to stop it. But this flavor of change isn’t just a benign curiosity, it’s being weaponized.
If you say ‘stewardess’ instead of ‘flight attendant’ - or hell, if you use the word ‘programmer’ instead of ‘engineer’ at work, you’ll get some OK Boomer eye rolls...but there are phrases and words that were totally acceptable 10 minutes ago that will suddenly (more or less) put you on the wrong end of an HR meeting, with all that implies. I’ve said things that have prompted my 6th grader to say ‘dad if you use that word it means you’re a racist’ - not ‘you shouldn’t say that’ or ‘there’s a new word we use’ or ‘Ok Boomer’ but ‘you are a racist. Full stop.’ because that’s what she’s constantly hearing at school.
Now draw a straight line from that into the future when we have a cohort of young adults who have been brought up being told that a person’s intent, the quality of their soul, their worth to society, their right to live and work...can be weighed by hearing them speak one word, context, intention, background be damned. It gives me serious concern.
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.
I think its lip service more than anything else. Much easier (and cheaper) to talk about DEI than lower tuition across the board to make these schools more accessible.
I’m not cheapening my kids education, sorry. Providing great education is expensive.
Its not my fault society values education far less than I do. In fact, I pour a ton of resources into education over and beyond what my kids use and still people complain to me about how my advocacy is wrong. Welp, lets see you all shovel a ton of resources and countless volunteer hours into k-12 education. I try to spread my philanthropy around for sure but of course I’m going to enable my kids success and contentment as best as I know how.
What’s a great education? Imo if you’re abandoning academic rigor (advanced math, serious books , opening students horizons to other cultures periods ideas and *provincialising* the here and now, encouraging free and an uninhibited vigorous debate, etc) in favor of a monoculture of political indoctrination and fear and presentist naval gazing privileging one lens only through which to analyze only contemporary American society then respectfully are you really providing a good education?
(To be clear - I’m using the general you here. Don’t know your views far less any school you are associated with!)
What is your data on that sir? You seem to have made wild assumptions.
I could lead an argument with "IMO if you're a baby eating pedophile..." too. To be clear, my values and my kids school support inclusiveness of ideas and academic rigor and none of the bullshit stereotypical nonsense you've advanced here. THanks
Quality education is expensive to provide because it necessarily requires providing resources and paying teachers salaries. Things I'm willing to spend far more on than the average.
I have made no personal assumptions as I actually bothered to explicitly clarify. I do however see and read how in *some cases* eg dei ideolgy justifies the elimination of advanced placement classes and the teaching of calculus , the narrowing down and dumbing down of literature classes , the inability of students and teachers to enrage in free and open debates on too many subjects and a divisive harmful atmosphere that encourages students to prioritize their American-census-defined racial identity over any other aspect of their personality and interests. Again, not necessarily in our case but in enough cases. All done in the name of, and often via the actual mechanisms of dei (eg by dei bureaucrats, )
Its frustrating when clearly misguided, stereotypical and clearly false assumptions are made against work and advocacy one passionately pursues.
I assure you I've seen zero evidence of any dumbing down of curriculum to serve these interests or anything else. I've seen my kids school thrive and them be really effective, decent, smart kids who are every bit if not more capable on core subject matter as I was at the same age and those around them that attend public schools. They're also receiving an excellent moral education, one that I've opted into and specifically embrace. That morality is explicitly pluralistic, open and truth seeking, as core features.
Private education costs more because of student teacher ratio, the more modern and better facilities and technology, more opportunity for travel and visiting local institutions.
I insisted that lowering tuition of private schools to encourage integration is definitely NOT the answer to our education problems. WE need a lot MORE funding, which I provide and advocate for, both for my kids school and for public schools.
Meanwhile our Philly public schools are often legit dangerous, often due to poor ventilation, a facility problem COVID magnified badly. I advocate and materially support the Education Law Center, which seeks to use legal action to force the state to more adequately fund Philly public schools.
I also advocate and help to fund a wonderful little nonprofit called Reading Allowed, a nonprofit tutoring service (one that spun out of our private progressive school) for kids with learning disabilities. This program relies on intensive tutoring for overcoming language learning disabilities, which is something even our expensive private school cannot provide due to its massive expense. It provides the service using a sliding scale based on financial need and subsidized by the generosity of supporters to offer this to families that cannot afford it. Research shows an absurd portion of violent offenders suffered learning disabilities and never learned to properly read, and fell through cracks because of this.
I have also volunteered in the Big Brother Big Sister mentor ship program as a means to promote racial harmony and gain specific exposure and help to serve to undeserved black communities (though regrettably over COVID my relationship dwindled)
So the pushback I receive here, especially when I mentioned some such advocacy on MLK day, is really stinking aggravating, especially when I'm told I'm not earnest or that I'm doing it wrong. You want to do it - go for it.
To be fair, these institutions also have generous financial aid for a small number of students from low income backgrounds. They don’t *only* do the cheap things.
Private k-12 education is pretty fundamentally an excellent place to push for cultural change. Involvement is voluntary and funding is private. Kids are young and impressionable (and our own). And my experience is this set will be meaningfully empowered by their education and network.
Yes, many of us are very much earnest and passionate about equal access as both a moral and long-term performance/effectiveness issue.
People work in private schools for many reasons. Maybe they worked in the public sector and got burned out. Maybe they transitioned from academia or a different career and wanted to teach but didn't have a teaching credential. Maybe they like the curricular and pedagogical independence of a private school. Or maybe they are good teachers but just don't have the skill-set or disposition to work in public schools. But you don't really see people go work in private schools because they want to perpetuate the existing social order. To Ed's good point above, folks want to feel that they are making a difference. So it's hard to recruit and retain a talented faculty without signaling commitment not just to include a more diverse student body but to make efforts to create a welcoming space. While it's common to see some authors (Matt included, to an extent) punch down at private school teachers, they are earnest, well-meaning people and their desires also push institutions to try and be more inclusive. The awkwardness of many DEI initiatives and the focus on language and race (there are no "low-income" or class-based affinity groups) is in part a reflection of the contradiction between the desire to be more inclusive with the imperatives of a tuition-charging institution where the majority of the community is high-income.
I guess I just feel the whole ideology is so sick I can’t relate. But i can see why many people growing up in America would see it differently. Personally I see no reason why it couldn’t be class based. Not via a crude mechanism like “affinity groups” (cringe) but simply by touting the generosity of financial aid and the school as a social mobility tool for bright middle and working class peole. That was the “progressive” ethos of private schools of old I believe. That- and trying to mold the elite generally to be better people. My problem is that it seems to me that now these schools subscribe to an ethos that is utter poison. But I get that this is a subjective assessment.
You bring up an interesting point. It used to be more common for private schools to have community service requirements, And while there was a noblesse de oblige vibe to some of these efforts they at least represented a genuine effort at public engagement. Ironically, a lot of current DEI work by focusing so much on internal attitudes and thought processes and by shying away from more explicit discussions of class have led to an abandonment of community-engagement efforts. And many liberal authors (again, Matt included) have fed into this by ridiculing actors in the private space for having progressive values. So it's damned if you do, damned if you don't. Not sure what ideology you are referring to or what exactly is sick. I don't find that language helpful. It's less ideology than a series of conflicting beliefs born, for the most part, of genuine good will. I think private schools do tout their financial aid budgets and do tout themselves as spaces for upward mobility. And they have to be careful to do so in a way that does not sound paternalistic or condescending. And, yes, Americans are by and large not good at class-based analysis.
I would suggest that if you believe in raising the next ruling-upper-class that is mostly wealth based : which is what you certainly de facto believe in if you support a private fancy prep school! Then the lesser evil under this inegalitarian model is noblesse oblige. If we must have rich elites (which I’m not sure about being personally a social democrat!) I’d much rather they be the old school noblesse oblige type and take public duty seriously
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.
Yeah, the entire argument boils down to "elite groups use language and customs to distinguish themselves from non-elites." Which... yes? In groups have done this to out groups since the dawn of language, and possibly before! Ask any red state conservative and one of the first things they'll complain about with liberals is the fancy language.
The argument I *thought* Matt was going to make was "elite institutions use language to obscure the fact that they're doing very little to effect real change in combating inequality." Does a place like Dalton really want to commit to charging lower tuition to advance educational opportunities for all NYC kids? Ha ha no. Alas... maybe for another comment section.
>>>“Yeah, the entire argument boils down to "elite groups use language and customs to distinguish themselves from non-elites." Which... yes? In groups have done this to out groups since the dawn of language, and possibly before“
I largely agree with this, but at least the English schools had the decency to acknowledge that this was what they were doing, instead of hiding it under several layers of incredibly tedious and ever-changing obscurantism under the guise of inclusivity while charging $60,000 / year.
One thing you can say for a bias for tradition instead of progressivism as a matter of elite signalling is that at least it’s likely a bit less subject to the euphemism treadmill.
“…at least the English schools had the decency to acknowledge that this was what they were doing…”
In 2007 a new housing development began construction where I used to live in New Jersey. [I had a recent conversation with someone here about NIMBYism in that town.] It began with the clearing of a 1.5 square mile wooded area, excavating for underground utilities, laying out a street grid, and the building of a model house near the main road to serve as a sales office. There was a tasteful sign made of brick, limestone, and bronze near the sales office with the pretentiously upscale yet bucolic name of the development. The typical house in the town was on a 1/8 - 1/4 acre plot; these new “estate” homes were on 2+ acres and were 5,000+ square feet, depending on the model. Prices started at $950K before upgrades.
I checked out the developer’s website, which was appropriately slick (by 2007 standards) and included detailed floor plans for each model. Some of the models included a bedroom with direct access to one of the garages, and were labeled “Nanny’s Room.” For some reason it came up in conversation at work and I showed the website to a couple of my colleagues. One of them was British and he commented, “In England that room would be called the “Servant’s Quarters,” but you Americans pretend not to go for that sort of thing.
Yeah, I wasn't quite sure what the point (or argument?) was, either...just a discourse on his thoughts on this topic with no particular take-away? But it was interesting. And at bare minimum Matt's pieces set off spirited discussions! You can't beat it for a buck-fifty week.
They would argue that, but is that doing much to significantly dent inequality? Generously, let's say that's 50 students per year (it's probably less), versus about a million students in the NYC public school system. Even granting that a large chunk of those public school students are hardly poor, probably 99.9% of then aren't Dalton-rich.
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.
Fascinating!
Interesting. I'm small town E. Texas 1942 vintage and I grew up with pealed apples were for children and grown ups (or only men?) ate them unpeeled.
It's quite common in China for people to peel grapes.
Apparently in Mae West's time as well.
I wonder if that also didn’t have something to do with dental health (presumably worse in working classes in Victorian times). Peeled, and especially cut, apple is much easier to chew.
It may have, but both my parents cited concerns about the cleanliness of the peel as their reason. That doesn't mean that dental health wasn't a major factor, of course.
It was/is also a tradition and a signifier of class, but you'd never say that unless you are consciously trying to change class (as the character in the novel is doing).
My grandfather was a train driver (we don't call them "engineers") back in the days of steam and would presumably have arrived home covered in soot in need of a bath - which would mean soot everywhere, however carefully my grandmother would have cleaned.
Incidentally, if you've ever picked apples fresh from the tree, they tend to accumulate a sticky layer over the skin which needs to be washed off before you eat them (not always, but often). They are, of course, washed before being sold now, but they probably weren't in Victorian times, so the maid (or whatever servant) would wash them before putting them out on the table in an upper-class household, while a middle-class household would expect you to wash your own apple before eating it, which was my mother's practice.
“They are, of course, washed before being sold now”
Not in the US they’re not, and I suspect not in the rest of the world either. Sure, they look nice and shiny, but that’s because they’re sprayed with a food-grade wax during packing.
When I was a teenager, I worked for a large apple company that had dozens of orchards in the town where I grew up as well as in the surrounding towns. I worked in the orchards some, but mostly in the packing plant which had enormous refrigerated rooms where bins of apples were stored during the harvest and a packing line where the apples were sorted by size, graded by appearance, and manually packed into boxes for shipment. The packing line began with a open tank of water with a hydraulic platform where a wooden bin of apples would be lowered to float out and be picked up by a conveyor consisting of plastic cups - each cup on a pivot and weighted at one end. The plastic cups would tip out their contents at different points, depending on the weight of the individual apple, onto conveyor belts eight or so inches below. After coming out of the water the apples were sprayed with a quick drying wax from overhead nozzles.
One of my jobs was to retrieve bins of apples from the refrigerators with a forklift and line them up near the water tank for the guy who operated that station. The water in the tank was changed…not all that often. The apple bins had come in from the orchards, where they had been sitting on the ground while being filled by the Jamaican pickers. The orchards, between the trees, were mostly longish grass, trimmed two or three times during the growing season, but inevitably some bins came in with soil caked on parts of their skids as well as other contaminants both on the outside and inside of the bins: contaminants like apple leaves, stems, insects, and the occasional dead field mouse.
Even on the days when the packing line started with clean water, after cycling a couple dozen bins through the float tank, the water would be pretty muddy and by the end of the day the water had taken on the color of coffee with too little cream.
Wash your apples, people.
Yes, we were rich enough to get lots of sugar before modern dental care (even just toothbrushes, toothpaste, etc) so we had terrible cavities and rotten teeth through the nineteenth century
But we had NHS dentistry from the 1940s and actual oral health is pretty good these days (though it's been in crisis for a few years now and I suspect it is declining). We don't do anywhere near as much cosmetic dentistry as the US, but that's also true for much of the rest of Europe. As long as they're not rotten, a few teeth at funny angles isn't much of a deal.
Somewhere around 2010, UK oral health was better than the US - but Obamacare has improved it for poor Americans and the decline of NHS dentistry has damaged a lot of poorer Brits, so it may have turned around in the last few years.
There's a stereotype of Brits having *ugly* teeth, because NHS dentistry doesn't go in for orthodontics to anything like the extent that is normal in the US. But our actual oral health is AIUI pretty good, or at least comparable to peer nations.
Conversely, we have a stereotype of Americans having weirdly perfect teeth like pod people. It can be actively distracting in Hollywood movies, especially when American actors are playing pre-industrial people who wouldn't have had access to orthodontics. The love interest in Braveheart's dazzling smile forces itself to mind.
At my first job after college my officemate, who grew up in China, peeled all fruit, including peaches. Thin-skinned fruit (again, like peaches), he'd blanch in hot water before peeling. Same idea - he got used to that, growing up worried about clean water and pesticide contamination and so on.
I peel peaches because the furry skin irritates my mouth and makes me retch, but that's absolutely personal, not a cultural or traditional thing.
I rarely eat peaches, having a very strong preference for nectarines, for the obvious reason.
Fascinating! Thx!!
> 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
I have a good friend, a woman of latin origin who worked at a fancy Manhattan law firm. In a 1:1 a partner gently chastised her for a minor transgression, and mentioned as a woman of color she should be more cognizant of these things. My friend didn't realize she was in a category separate from everyone else and took offense to this.
Just seems kind of wild the old white dudes can still "other" you to your face but now it's in a "progressive" way so it's fine.
It's strange how terms like "colored" and "oriental" come across as racist, but I can't explain why other than association with an era in which overt racism was acceptable.
Or even stranger, how "people of color" and "colored people" can be interpreted vastly differently.
Older folks in my extended South Asian family have a lot of trouble with this too. They'll grasp for words (since English is not their first language) and say "colored people". When I correct them and say, "No, no, you can't say that, it's people of color", they'll ask what the difference is. And all I can really say is "One's really backwards and racist, and the other is very progressive!"
Why don't you just say that the latter is the preferred term nowadays?
"Backwards and racists vs progressive" seems like an unnecessarily political and judgey framing.
This is a case of the "euphemism treadmill". John McWhorter has a good episode of his podcast about this phenomenon: http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2017/04/john_mcwhorter_on_euphemisms.html
Basically, when a neutral term for a socially disadvantage group is used over many decades it takes on the negative "overtones" (connotations) associated with prejudice against that group. This is how the term "colored" goes from the being used in the NAACP to being seen as a slur.
“It's strange how terms like ‘colored’ and ’oriental’ come across as racist…”
I mentioned this in a pas comment on SB: My wife is Korean, i.e., she grew up in Korea and came to the US as an adult. She used to hate* being called Asian, but was totally fine with the label Oriental. She saw Oriental as being more correctly descriptive because she looks far, far more like Japanese and Chinese people than she looks like, for instance, a Tamil.
*She more or less gave up caring, because what’s the point in living your life enraged?
That's interesting, because "Asian" is a term I still primarily associate with East Asia / the "Far East", and I believe that connotation is fairly widespread in the US. I don't intuitively think of people from the Indian subcontinent as being "Asian" (and that's not even getting into the rest of the Asian continent).
Also interesting that she associates "oriental" with East Asia specifically, because that is another term with a wide geographic scope depending on the time and place. For example, I've seen Persian-styled rugs referred to as "oriental rugs".
Yes, in the U.S. "Asian" is generally associated with East Asia, but in the UK it is generally associated with South Asia.
"...'Asian' is a term I still primarily associate with East Asia / the 'Far East'..."
The US government does not agree with that definition.
"Colored" I do understand because as Milan mentions, this implies that white is colorless and default. Nonwhite just seems better to me.
That's really just overthinking it, though. The same would apply to POC, of course, but that's en vogue. Things just fall in and out of favor
The other big problem with binary labels is that putting white people in a separate category from anyone else could inculcate the idea that white people need to start acting like a coherent racial demographic that needs to promote it's own interests apart from so-called POC.
That would be very bad on the merits but is also counter to everything proponents of equity claim to want.
This is a point Glenn Loury makes very frequently - keep telling white people that they are a monolithic identity group and some are going to believe you and act accordingly.
Yep, whenever I see some DEI material talking about making white people "aware of their whiteness," etc., I feel like I'm in a horror movie watching the drunk/stoned teenagers willfully reading from the book of dark magic in the graveyard at midnight.
There’s a scene in The Jerk where Steve martin’s character learns that he’s adopted and says in horror, “You mean I’m gonna stay this color?!”
This is a huge problem. Asking people to lean into their whiteness as an identity is one of the stupidest, most dangerous things I can think of. There are WAY worse things than the colorblindness ideal. What next, should we encourage Germans to meditate on their Aryan identity?
There is SOME value in asking people that do enjoy privileges to bear that in mind when asked to consider extending those privileges to others. But it needs to be done carefully and with the understanding that improving the lives of some people does not necessarily mean diminishing the lives of others. Society is a positive sum game.
One of my axes to grind with the woke is the abuse of the word privilege. A title of nobility is a privilege. Not being victimized (or being statistically less likely to be victimized) by the state or by individuals very much is not. It’s simply how things ought to be for everyone.
A thousand times this! What an absurdly counterproductive word to use, almost guaranteed to be misinterpreted by someone who doesn't follow "the discourse", and literally wrong to boot!
Probably misinterpreted "by someone who actually needs to be persuaded." I think _I_ understood it without "following the discourse," but I was sympathetic to efforts to remove the legacy of slavery/past mistreatment. But I'd still deflect to conversation to how to be persuasive in general, not the word. For example "Black Lives Matter" has been "misunderstood" but I don't think there was a better slogan.
It's a word. "Relative advantage" would be another. Whatever best gets across the idea (that may not be obvious the first time someone thinks about it.)
It’s a word that already conveys a certain meaning. Moreover it looks at things backwards. The idea of civil right movement etc is to invite more people into the tent of equal rights , into the mainstream, not to kick people out or to delegitimize it. “Privilege” smacks of luxury and excess. No one on America has *or ever had* privileges by the sole virtue of being white. Some people were discriminated against or had their human rights more or less terribly violated because they were perceived as a racial other. That’s not at all the same thing .
To me at least, "privilege" refers to an entitlement that follows immediately from a particular status. Golfers who've previously won the Masters have the privilege of wearing a green jacket when the trophy is presented to a new winner. Any prior winner can do that; anyone else cannot. Segregated Pullman cars involved a system of racial privilege: anyone deemed to be white could, ipso facto, sit in the whites-only car; anyone deemed to be black could not.
That's totally different from the phenomenon of differential treatment by police. White people undoubtedly benefit from being less frequently subjected to abusive and degrading encounters with law enforcement. But if you're white and a police officer does treat you in a humiliating manner, you can't complain by saying, "I'm sorry, there seems to have been some mistake: I'm white, you see, and so by rule I should've gotten preferential treatment."
Post-Jim Crow America really doesn't have racial privileges, at least not ones that redound to the benefit of white people. So if you want people to notice the ways in which certain racial groups are relatively advantaged or disadvantaged in American society, telling them to focus on where they enjoy some racial *privilege* is an absolutely terrible strategy.
To some extent that's already happening. "You will not replace us." The question is, how much is cause and how much is effect?
It seems to me that if you’re interested in oppression dynamics, the critical characteristic IS minority status. There’s nothing inherent to being a person of color that creates disadvantage, but rather the fact that the person is a minority in the society where they live. Being in a minority of ANY kind (racial, religious, sexual) is inherently going to be on the spectrum from occasionally inconvenient to downright shitty.
That’s far too universalist to be fashionable! It might even make you think of other societies , countries , or historical periods, god forbid!
Seriously though, the irony of the woke is that they are the most Eurocentric (or rather america-centric) presentist people in the world who really do seem to believe in a 21st cent twist on the white man’s burden.
But even in the that framing sometimes minorities are the ones running the show. Just some off-the-top-of-my-head examples:
Prior (and largely also, post) the French Revolution a tiny Aristocracy ran everything. Modern Americans tend to not "see class" but that was a social construct every bit as real as our modern conceptions of race. Aristocrats only married and socialized with each other and a person on the street could id them by the way they dressed, walked and talked.
Peruvians of European descent are maybe 10% of their population but disproportionately wealthy and in positions of power.
White people were the minority in Aparthaid S Africa.
Yes, this doesn't track at all. Brahmins in India, etc. Even in the U.S., there used to be a WASP elite that was clearly distinct from the general "white" majority. The critical characteristic clearly isn't minority status, certainly not in isolation.
Not entirely. Color is a social construct just like race, just like class. David's stereotypical Punjabi would not be a POC in stereotypical Texas at all.
This is one of my least favorite lazy shibboleths. If color is a construct and so is race, is ethnicity as well?
Then surely gender is? Oh boy, and don’t get me started about the nuclear family… these are some of the most common, most basic, most widely-used-across-cultures categorical definitions in use by the human race. Why do (some subset of) progressives persist in attacking and undermining them so?
"If color is a construct and so is race, is ethnicity as well?"
Not to be glib, but yep, it is. Society is just a bunch of social constructs, many of them critically important to the way we live, but some of them quite superficial. Family, as you identify, is one of the former, but POC on the other hand feels quite superficial.
I would personally say that color is the type of construct that could be "de-constructed," to everyone's benefit in the way that say, hair length is. Ditto for race. But ethnicity probably can't be, although it could be minimized in many contexts. And certainly doing away with family as a social construct would make no sense at all.
Super like !
I’d add that race is a very historically dependent social construct that didn’t exist in the same manner before the modern era, so empirically we can do without it!
But a minority of no significance for most purposes.
This is a decent explanation for why I dislike "LGBT" or "LGBTQIA+ (however many letters and numbers they've added)" to describe people. I am gay. I'm not a lesbian, I am not transgender, I am not asexual, or bisexual, or any other sexual minority. I'm gay. The gay civil rights movement and the transgender civil rights movement are not the same. The issues are quite different, and while they intersect in some ways: they do not in many others.
Since I was a kid the alphabet soup of sexual and gender minorities has confounded me. With LGBT, I understand through "LGB"- a very sensible political coalition (not a personal identifier though), but T lost me. The addition of Q sort of mad sense as a stopping point to say everyone can be in the group but that just begs the question why not just use Queer, and why are LGB and T in a group together to begin with. Then adding the adding I again confounds me because I represents a set of physical medical conditions which seem entirely unrelated to LGB and I guess related to T specifically in terms of non-traditional appearance and surgical implications. A is the most baffling to me because I am not sure what the political implications of being asexual are. Like I guess you're just in some sense outside the hetero-norm but still confusing though I see some coalition there with LGB. And the final plus is the worst offender of all because what is Q if not serving as the plus.
Well put
Queer is probably the most accurate description, but I don’t like the implication (which was bigoted when it was used previously). Because homosexuals, transgender people, etc aren’t queer at all.
I thought the Q was "questioning". I'm only learning now it can be either?
I share your sentiments from the other end of the acronym. Historical circumstances put everyone under the same yoke, and there's never been enough just-T to splinter off and form our own separate tribe. (Nor would I want there to be, that'd indicate Something Went Wrong in a big way.) But it's always felt somewhat forced outside of theoryland. When I spend time with gays and lesbians, it's hard not to be struck by how...utterly banal they usually are? Yes, there's sometimes the stereotypical mannerisms and such. But my brain defaults to rounding off "gay person" or "lesbian person" to just "person". Not much more remarkable than their hair colour or whatever. (Granted, the demographic breakdown in SF is...uh...not reflective of the broader population.)
By contrast - us trans people are, frankly, usually weird. Not said in a judgey disapproving way, more like...well...personality comorbidity? Being an extreme outlier on one dimension makes one much more likely to be an extreme outlier on others. It's really unusual for me to meet a trans person whose sole differentiating characteristic is their gender identity...that seems to be the Platonic ideal of both lurid erotica and certain activists, an archetypal Perfectly Normal Person who just happens to be trans. (A trans woman, specifically, since no one ever remembers that trans men exist too...except maybe in the UK.) And, of course, a group unified by large standard deviations from normies will itself have large internal deviations. There's often so little in common once you scratch the surface grievances about gender stuff...a feeling of "if you weren't in my Specialist Tribe, I wouldn't like you, actually".
So it's been very weird watching the Marriage Equality 2.0 playbook attempting to be recycled for trans people...the script simply doesn't fit. And there's a contradiction with insisting that sex and gender are totally separate unrelated things - yet still grouping LGB and T together! Similarly, a common trans advocacy retort to TERFs is that the category "woman" shouldn't be defined by their shared oppression...yet that applies just as much to LGB + T. I think it's admirable to aspire to the same "equal treatment" outcomes...but the required changes for that kind of parity are, well, just a really different ask in so many cases.
I think the movements are different and that’s important
I also think being trans is simply a lot more challenging than being single sex attracted.
FWIW I strongly disagree as a bisexual man. I think that in general, people who fall within the LGBTQIA+ umbrella tend to share substantial common threads of experience related to being a minority along gender and sexuality lines (in part because I think that negative attitudes towards LGB people often interrelated to negative attitudes towards gender nonconformity). Moreover, there's a long history of shared community and joint activism among all the different groups under the LGBTQIA+ label. It also feels to me that to reject the idea of a shared label now after gay marriage has been recognized but when transgender rights remain politically controversial is a very selfish move.
Sure, but there is still a sense in which there is a straight majority, right? How would you classify non-straight people as a group? One increasingly popular moniker is queer, but I hate for its history as a slur, its problematic literal meaning (obviously related to the history), and for its extreme vagueness. LGBT is actually not bad imo in that it actually reminds everyone that we are in fact a bunch of *separate* distinct group, that do however share something in common even if its only a negative thing (not being part of the cisgender straight super-majority)
I personally am not particularly interested in the straight-not straight; trans-cis dichotomies. I think they obscure far more than they illuminate. Furthermore I don't think creating a category has for all of "not straight; not cis" people has been particularly constructive. Again: like POC there is not as much commonality as people think.
The argument for the gay civil rights movement was that gay people really aren't that different from straight people. We wanted to be able to enjoy the same institutions that straight people did; we just wanted to marry people we were attracted to and not get fired for our identity. The "LGBTQ" trend today feels far more like making an identity of something that is irrelevant and highlighting differences for the sake of highlighting differences (and, I suspect, there is some "I am an oppressed minority because of my sexuality" going on as well; being straight is no longer 'cool').
May I remind you that the “gay civil rights” fight included lesbians? That they too wanted the right for marriage equality and have since exercised it in similar numbers?
And I think the tension between particularist and integrationist forces are found in every minority. There was the gay marrriage fight but there was also the fringe arguing against the “heteronormative” family structure. Today there are fringe elements but there are also trans people who just want to be accepted as who they are (eg allowed to serve in army , a struggle paralleling that of gays a very short while ago!)
In short I think there is universal applicability in the pluralism and tolerance and it’s smart politics besides to show solidarity. That being said- I agree we should push back agaisnt bad or stupid directions.
Obviously Lesbians and Gays both fought for the same civil rights.
But the Trans-Rights movement is quite different than the Gay rights movement. Trans activists are pushing a far different agenda with broader and more basic changes to our society than "let people of the same sex get married to each other" which is nowhere near as transformational.
Which goes back to what I liked about what Milan said above: being gay and being trans are somewhat similar, but they're not the same thing. Bunching the movements together obscures more than it enlightens in my mind.
Yes, there is also a real conflict between some in trans community and some in homosexual community particularly lesbian. Many in trans movement would like to destroy binary concept of gender and make everything a spectrum.
Meanwhile, some homosexual are are adamantly sort of extreme in their gender identity. Many lesbians see their community as a hyper-feminine subculture that has rejected masculinity. And so people like JK Rowling, hope I'm not putting words into her mouth, complain about this, and how trans activism is in conflict with their identity, then get epic backlash for it.
We need to find room to accept people that don't agree with us and just leave them be to do their own thing IMO!
I obviously want to tread very carefully here due to the history you cite, but I would rather have queer stick as an easy to say one syllable word over the growing alphabet soup assault of the other direction.
I am not queer. I am gay. Both should go away as far as I am concerned.
I would be entirely fine with that!
I wish we could find a more positive or neutral word to replacing queer. Gay is positive. Lesbian is neutral. Bi is a bit medical for my liking but sort of gets the point across, ditto trans. But an overarching terms that’s not insulting is lacking.
Why do we need an over arching term to combine two different categories? Being gay and being trans should not be combined in my mind
"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."
I have a similar issue with the term "brown" (which, as an aside, literally makes my stomach turn as I wonder how it suddenly became acceptable for people to talk like a 1950s Jim Crow sheriff) -- why is a 100% anglophone Hispanic whose family has lived in the US since the New Mexico territory was annexed being grouped for political purposes with an immigrant Punjabi Sikh based just on their shared skin tone, something which has no historical basis in either American culture or law?
Brown, to me, means people like me (i.e., would get "randomly" checked by TSA) and not Hispanic or Latino people.
Except that it clearly is including Hispanics/Latinos in most usages of it in academia and the media. E.g., "Police Brutality and the Militarization of Black and Brown Communities" (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ace.20427https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ace.20427); "The coronavirus pandemic is hitting black and brown Americans especially hard on all fronts" (https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/08/us/coronavirus-pandemic-race-impact-trnd/index.html).
Colloquially amongst younger people, what Milan says is definitely right. I think in the US the major racial categories being White, Black, Hispanic, and Asian didn't really cover well the massive populations in north africa, the middle east, and south asia and so brown came to mean that. Or it has totally different origins and I'm speaking out of my a**.
Edit: For clarification, this is not how I would categorize race, just my perception of what the common parlance is. I am well aware that Hispanic is an imprecise term in its colloquial speech and personally I typically use latin to refer people from Latin America. Frankly, I try by best to avoid race at all costs especially when country of origin/heritage is appropriate and available. My point is that in standard US speech White refers to people with pale skin and European descent, Black is dark skin and African descent, Hispanic is anyone from North America who is not white or black and from an American country other than the US (except for the southwest) or Canada, and Asian refers to a range of skin tones but mostly is meant to mean east Asian heritage. Again, this is not my personal view, just my impression of how the terms are most often used.
Is a person from Spain Hispanic in your list of races?
And what about a blonde, blue-eyed Argentinian?
I live in real life and not the media, though I do presently reside in academia
You can use the word however you want, but if you refer to "brown people" without further context explaining it, that's probably going to result in many listeners thinking you're including Hispanics. I mean I've never encountered anyone in real life use the term "brown" to refer to a group of people at all, but I certainly get a steady dose of it via mainstream national media (NPR, CNN, etc.) and it's *not* being used as a colloquial synonym for just South Asians. (E.g.,: “'Driving While Brown' Chronicles How Latino Activists Brought Down Arizona's Sheriff Joe Arpaio" -- https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2021/04/20/driving-while-brown-joe-arpaio ; "Many Latinos with indigenous or mestizo backgrounds – people who may otherwise self-identify as 'brown' – are naturally reluctant to fit themselves into the black-white binary of conventional US metrics." -- https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/04/opinions/latino-vote-midterms-republicans-democrats-gest/index.html).
I assumed “brown” referred to anyone whose skin was darker than a white person, and therefore subject to colorism/racism, but wasn’t black. I always took it to include darker skinned Hispanic people (a fair-skinned Spaniard, probably not).
That's been my experience, as someone raised around Mexican people and who married into a Mexican-American family. They would say they are brown, even the ones who are fair-skinned. Census forms be damned, none of them would say they are white.
Interesting Milan. I know someone here in California who is of 100% Cuban descent and definitely considers himself a POC.
Another perspective:
"I remember the first time I realized I was a foreigner in my country of birth.
"A month into my first term at a large midwestern university, I got an invitation for a banquet meal in honor of the recipients of some bundle of free cash I’d been awarded. I vaguely remembered having accepted it, but had assumed it was due to grades or SAT scores. Somewhat mystified, I put on that blue blazer most of us had in college (the one with the jingly brass buttons), and headed to the Alumni Hall for the free chow.
"I looked around. Most of the other guests were either Black or Mexican-American in what was and is a very white Midwestern state. As I sat there eating the chicken dinner, and after some interesting chit-chat with my neighbors whom I found as exotic as they apparently found me, it finally dawned on me: Oh, I see….apparently I’m some sort of minority now or something. These people think of me as some sort of Other, and this whole song and dance is part of that Othering."
https://www.thepullrequest.com/p/latinx-plaining-the-election
Amazing how often attempts to be helpful and kind are resented.
No, it's amazing how tone-deaf, insulting, and condescending "attempts to be helpful and kind" have become.
After 9/11 I used to travel for work a lot, often with a colleague who was born in Sri Lanka. He was tagged for random searches every time. Such rotten luck!
That’s really well said.
“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.”
I think “whiteness” does the same thing.
I confess that I don't even know, in a basic extensional sense, who is actually covered by the term "people of color."
There's a term I see not infrequently these days, BIPOC, which I'm told stands for "black, indigenous, and/or person of color." That seems to suggest that at least some black people are *not* persons of color; otherwise, there'd be no need to add the "B." But I would've thought blackness was the paradigm case of being "of color," so that's confusing to me.
Similarly for "indigenous": the abbreviation implies that there are some I that are neither B nor POC. Does that mean they're white?
BIPOC always strikes me as Oppression Olympics gone amuck.
BIPOC sounds like it describes bisexual people of color
I think what you’re missing in BIPOC is an order rooted in degree of marginalization. I am not sure I agree with the order. Maybe IPBOC, considering what Native Americans had in say 1500 (all of North and South America with diverse cultures) and what they have today...that’s a big loss.
It’s completely off the scale of merely disparate outcomes in income, education or health. The legacy of European migration to the America’s on its native peoples is enormous. What do the America’s look like today if European people stayed home? That’s a good question for the alternative history crowd.
Thanks for the explanation -- that at least takes care of the apparent definitional confusion that I was pointing out.
It only makes me more antipathetic to the term, though. I can't fathom the appeal of a category meant to apply to what may or may not be the vast bulk of the world's population that's based on a highly tendentious thesis about which members are relatively more "marginal" to some unspecified "center" -- a thesis that has all the marks of being a gratuitous generalization from the historical experience of one society in particular.
The newest ones tho are "minoritized" and "racialized"- like, heavily suggesting this is all white people's fault, I think? But also, aren't white people being racialized too when you call them white? 🤔🤔🤔
The idea, I think, is to remind us that race is socially constructed. Of course whites are also racialized, but the argument is that in a white majority society white is seen as the transparent standard. Just like “having an accent” implies having a foreign or minority accent, although every language speaker actually has an accent.
Race is a social reality and a scientific construct
Those terms read as painful. Verbing weirds language, indeed. What would the full conjugations even be...racialization? Minoritied? Nothing was wrong with "other"...so score another point for the Carne wordsmiths, I guess. (Carnists?)
As good a piece of rhetoric as it was, that essay "America's First White President" (Coates, I think?) sure made me think: wow, way to encourage white people to see themselves as a separate and distinct race. Solidarity goes in the same bin as colourblindness...in exchange we got the new and improved [Coming Soon].
I could find both of these terms being useful in the sense of "racialized" meaning "unnecessarily injecting race into something" and "minoritized" meaning "unnecessarily putting someone in an out group". But as your further points suggest, that it likely not what the people you cite have in mind.
And that’s exactly the point. In some contexts, Jewish people might be minoritized, and in some contexts, they might be treated like the majority. The implicit claim is that this is true of all groups.
Dominance constructs are weird and we'd all conveniently rather not think about them too logically because they are fundamentally unfair...but we should try
I don't know that's really responsive to FrigidWind's point about being question-begging, though. Suppose that for any quality that something has, there's a corresponding causal account of how it came to be that way. If we point verbally to the process by naming the quality, isn't that just a circuitous and possibly misleading way of pointing to the quality itself?
That is, if my mattress is soft, should I instead say that it's softized -- since there surely is some set of causes by which it acquired the quality of softness? Is the computer I'm typing this on not "old," but rather "oldized?"
Or, in Moliere's classic example, is saying that sleep is caused by a "dormitive potency" saying anything meaningful at all? Is replacing saying one is asleep with saying one has been "sleepized" any different?
If there is some constant process by which the softness of your mattress is being renewed and reinforced, it might sometimes be helpful to describe it that way. Once in a while, it might be useful to distinguish who has a clean kitchen because it was cleaned once and then never used, from who has a clean kitchen because they constantly thoroughly clean it after every time they use it.
I think the point is to emphasize that the state of being a minority is not a purely intrinsic state, and the relevant factor here is not just the numerical fact (the way that people whose last name starts with a letter in the second half of the alphabet are minorities) but is the fact about how people are treated differently as a result of the status (it's rare to find a situation where someone is minoritized as a result of the first letter of their last name - though if you constantly call on people in alphabetical order, you might be doing so).
It's of course surely fair to note that most DEI activity *continues* to treat people differently as a result of their status, but their claim is that the *quality* of different treatment might be relevant to whether a treatment is a "minoritization" or not.
I agree that if there are multiple distinct causal processes that might account for a kitchen's being clean, it's useful to have different words to refer to each of them. But those can't *replace* the concept of cleanness, because it has to be possible for us to agree that a given kitchen is clean while disagreeing about whether it got that way by Path A (frequent cleaning) or Path B (infrequent use).
The real question is whether the term for the process has some independent substantive content, so that "X outcome was produced by Y process" is a falsifiable, non-tautological claim. If "minoritized" just means "treated in whatever way it is that such treatment has the effect of making one a minority," then it's really still the concept of "minority" that's doing all the work.
The danger, though, is that by treating "minoritized" as equivalent to "minority," some unstated substantive assertion about how minorities come to be that way gets smuggled into the definition of "minority" itself. Frankly, I worry that for the language-updaters that's often precisely the desired outcome.
I do not make these things up…. One example: https://www.pdcnet.org/tej/content/tej_2022_0999_1_7_99 “Using “minoritized” makes it clear that being minoritized is about power and equity not numbers, connects racial oppression to the oppression of women, and gives us an easy way to conceive of intersectionality as being a minoritized member of a minoritized group. ”
😂
So, being minoritized is a good thing? Or a bad thing? I'm not sure based on that excerpt.
In some sense you can acquire race — see this excerpt: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/553643/not-quite-not-white-by-sharmila-sen/
One of my elderly aunts still obsessively wears tons of makeup as she was often not accepted as part of the dominant white culture as a child and desperately fought for that her whole life.
Folks forget that in the 40s 50s that Italians Greeks and Jews and others with moderately darker skin, many taken for granted as part of "white" or dominant culture today, weren't considered "White" just a few decades ago, did not have access to top schools (like ones I've attended) or dominant culture.
You can check out the yearbooks of such institutions like my high school alma mater Lawrenceville and find that if you go back just a few decades, almost all students had English king or apostle names, and there was absolutely no one off-white til until after civil rights era and associated reforms. Same went for many country clubs and social clubs.
Irish people weren't white for a long time in the US. Remember that 100 years ago religion was a bigger deal and Catholicism was othering.
Yeah, I wouldn’t hate “racialized” if it were being used to point out when someone (of any ethnicity) is being flattened into an avatar of a socially-constructed racial group.
In social justice logic, a white person can never be “minoritized” on the basis of race because we live in a white supremecist world, QED- nothing to do with quantities of people. Women are also “minoritized” by this logic despite being 52% of the population becuz patriarchy. (Views expressed are not my own.)
Ha yes. That reminds me, I’ve also heard “global majority” to refer to non-white people!!!
White minority or minorities is an issue discussed in the context of places like South Africa I believe
Agree for similar reasons as you (as seen my last name).
I actually think there is a more practical reason "POC" has become in vogue for the same reason I use it ; Twitter has a character limit and it's an easy shorthand way to abbreviate and space.
That's fine but it's weird to port these terms into normal speech because very few people self-identify as acronyms.
Sure, but I suspect that's just in part because "online" language just starts becoming part of everyday use more generally. I've definitely had people say "O M G" when seeing something surprising or saying "L O L" . Heck I suspect I've done it without even realizing it.
So yeah, agree with your substantive point about "POC" as a term. But I honestly think it's just become a shorthand for some people use without even thinking about it (perhaps something we should push back on)
POC, specifically, is mostly an attempt to form a political coalition.
I think the excessive usage of acronyms and initialisms could also be a sign of being Excessively Online, as they can be simple to use in text but exhaustive to use in everyday conversation.
RM and NW are one character shorter!
Very interesting idea!!
My ancestors since at least the early 1600s, and probably long before, were all from Ireland and Scotland, and thus generally poor and very "white." I have very little pigmentation but even as a child, eight decades ago, it was evident to me that my skin could not realistically be regarded as white in any literal sense. One of the apartment buildings I grew up in had a janitor who was an albino, with a skin distinctly paler than mine. (A very sweet man, who went out of his way to teach a curious little boy the art of throwing coal on the grate of a furnace, raising steam for building heat.) Even at age 6 I could recognize at least some of the multiple levels of absurdity in calling Mr. Evans a, "colored man."
I spent my career as a scientist, working always in quite meritocratic settings where almost all traces of animus against the Irish had faded—one saw only flashes of it among a few of the oldest men. To a very great extent all that really mattered was ability, and few cared about race or ethnicity, per se. Although most of my education and work was in physical sciences and mathematics, I had always also been interested in anthropology and paleoanthropology, and had absorbed much of the anthropologist's detached interest in cultural variations. In particular I had recognized that attitudes ostensibly about race or ethnicity are very largely in fact about cultural traits. Generally, people face positive and negative sanctions from both in- and out-groups to align their cultural traits "appropriately" with their socially-assigned racial/ethnic identity. On the whole this actually seems to work fairly well for most people. Indeed, many are indignant or offended when called out for exerting such pressure. They are usually genuinely unaware of how much pain their "natural" and seemingly innate behaviors can cause.
I early learned that it was generally safest and most productive to avoid racial and ethnic categorization altogether and deal with people individually, without labels. At the same time, it was very clear to me that if you knew something of a person's ethnic origins you had valuable information regarding the likely trend of their culturally-conditioned values and traits.
As for Milan Singh, the notion that anyone could be ignorant of the denotation and connotations of his surname strikes me as a bit astonishing. Surely "Singh" is as distinctively Indian as "O'Neil" is Irish.
Thanks for sharing! I found your personal recollection about the fading animus agaisnt Irish among the older men of say 6 decades ago(?) especially interesting.
To your last question. May I remind you that not all of us have been around for 8 decades, and moreover that the us remains a nation of immigrants (and, besides, that some here aren’t even American). Without growing up and living besides Indian communities, and considering their underrepresentation in western media (a fortiori canonical western literature) , why is it so surprising that some of us wouldn’t see “Singh” and have an immediate understanding of the ethnic implications ? It’s no more surprising than the fact that I bet for half the people here “Goldstein” is not that obvious as it was for Orwell and is for Rowling , or indeed how O’Neil might not be obvious to those not raised in the Anglosphere or with a healthy dose of English literature (for which incidentally the Irish and the Scots made an enormous contribution!)
I've always thought that "POC" was a weird circumlocution for "non-white," and people get really uncomfortable when you point it out. But hey, at least it looks like I'm not alone 😂
I am nonwhite, not clear on whether I’m a BIPOC or not.
I think it's a word that people use to describe other people most of the time - I've never known anyone who describes themselves as "BIPOC" but I've seen it in many, many institutional statements etc.
You’re right in your reasoning, and you’re far from alone. MY is making a rhetorical hyperbole. Using minorities is fine and in fact preferable in many cases. It has the heuristic advantage of suggesting the inherent reason for potential discrimination /power imbalance (the crude realty of numbers, the perceptions it creates of difference). It has the further advantage of being universal and neutral- applicable to any society and not using very historically and culturally-specific , highly loaded and ontologically questonable terms such as color/white as you point out. And yes it’s broader, but that is an advantage more often than not. Forces you to think about other kinds of disadvantages, but also to what actually is unique to racial minorities as opposed to others. All and al a *much* better term in many cases.
But Indians are one of the ORM's and so don't count as POC's, or so I understand. :)
When it's time to get-out-the-vote for Democrats they suddenly count as POCs again.
Well the other guys are talking about "a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States" (while keeping plutocratic ghoulishness quiet) so I will take my chances
Not necessarily a good one. In my canvassing in No Va, south Asians lean Democratic and East Asians lean Republican.
Most of the time the results are absurd, like the examples of Thomas and Wigan above, but I do think it's useful to comprehend that almost everyone is privileged in some manners and oppressed in other manners. The precise amounts of each differ by person, of course, and are rarely in equal proportions, but it would be a lot more honest way to confront these societal differences that come up. But we tend not to because it complicates simple narratives that people want to push.
You should do that!
I find it interesting that, like the author in the video, we continue to assume white is “default” and “not seen” in America. Seems like over the last ten years there’s been a staggering increase in talking about whiteness, and never in a good way (not that I want to talk about whiteness in a good way either). At what point do we admit that “white” is another way we “racialize” people just like all the other groups?
The author is my mom.
Thanks for sharing your insightful and very much valid perspective Milan
There are others however, and although I am not a person of color, I am friends and acquaintances with several who describe themselves as such. Please consider that to the ancestors of African American slaves, nearly all cultural connection to their ancestry has been removed as the institution of slavery very systematically destroyed such, the language and practices, education and literacy often forbidden.
I absolutely treasure my ancestral Greek heritage and culture - it sounds like maybe you do too with you Indian ancestry and culture. I am friends with many Indian families, as are my kids, unlike in my childhood, where I had very little exposure to Indian Americans in my education, and when I did, in the 80s and 90s they were very much culturally excluded and a distinct minority. I remember horrible attitudes, for example a recurring episode in my elite prep school in which teenage white kids would try to knock the turban off a Sikh boy's head (with snowballs or apples), consistently, as a joke
For millions and millions of Americans whose ancestry was scrubbed of those direct connections, "People of color" is a fitting identity, one that indirectly references this stripping of more specific ancestral cultural. Live and let live bro. Peace.
If "people of color" is meant to refer exclusively to the descendants of African American slaves, that'd be interesting and highly clarifying to know. But empirically that doesn't seem to be how the phrase is used at all.
And if it's not, then I don't really understand your argument. Why invent a term to lump together groups that do and groups that don't have the specific historical experience that you claim justifies using the term to begin with?
I don't think it is exclusively a term for slave descendants either. Just perhaps a fitting term if one's ancestry has been scrubbed. And not just me saying that, but one that speaks to many people and their conception of their own identity.
I didn't invent ANY of these terms btw
Its like the NAACP is librul woke institution that only exists in whiteboy colleges or something
Yep, that venerated, decades old civil rights organization with an enormous successful track record of promoting the "Advancement of Colored People" (a term I've quoted from the organization's title)......refers to a term that I should not use because it is "an affectation of upper class people (and not all of them at that)."
Cool story bro
So the people I know who call themselves people of color (many of which are decidedly NOT upper class) don't actually exist because you know more Indians than me?
Did I say a word about the term latinx? It is a term I've never once used in actual conversation
Isn’t “minority” still centering whiteness?
As a non-white minority person of colour, I'm glad Milan wrote the <s>person experiencing metallurgy</s> steelman version of the low-effort comment I was gonna reply with. Yes indeed - do I get any say in this labeling business, or is it just for whites? Just for PMC? Is it like certain other "reclaimed" terms where only the people actually in those categories can use them without offense? (Not a show I care for, but I did appreciate "Fresh Off the Boat" for taking back a former slur.)
I do often find my values and aesthetic choices aligned with those of elites...elegance is required in all things. But fussiness around words seems like a particularly pernicious type of White Saviour Syndrome. I am reminded of that controversial term Latinx, for example. "Hey, in our grand consideration, we thought about potential ways our mental model of a person of Latin ancestry might potentially be offended, and came up with a new term for you! Aren't you grateful?" Many Such Cases. It's especially jarring cause that same mentality is also likely to emphasize Centering Voices of Colour and Lived Experience and Preferred Pronouns and _____ People Are Not A Monolith and such. Protip: we're perfectly capable of coming up with our own labels, maybe simply ask first next time?
But of course, as Matt points out, the point often __isn't__ to improve anything, let alone actual material conditions. (Which is hard! A money here, an effort there, and sooner or later you're talking about real work.) It's just status games all the way down. And the annoying thing is that - it works. Because by being alienated and complaining about such norms here, I'm self-selecting out of elite culture in a big way. They win, more pie for them. As Marx (no, the other one) would say though: I don't want to belong to a club that would accept me as a member. Cause you can't be elitist without first being elite.
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.”
Bingo. I've been watching these things spiral for 40+ years, and after a certain amount of changes in terminology it starts to sound sillier and sillier. The arguments always sound reasonable, so you nod along and wholeheartedly support them, but then 10 years later the terms that you thought sounded so great that had such reasonable arguments in support of them come under attack by new great sounding words with reasonable arguments and you start to realize that EVERY term can be attacked by people creative enough to think of problems with them. If the underlying thing you're describing is what's actually problematic then you're never going to find a word that can't be tied to the problematic aspects of what it's describing. You have to change those underlying characteristics to actually have an impact. I think it's only a matter of time before "global south" becomes a problem and disfavored ("you're implying that being born relative to a hemispherical line somehow makes people disadvantaged, so labeling people as poor/backwards due solely to the relative global position of their birth is inherently racist and centers the global north as the default and acceptable location of one's birthplace." or something similar), so at some point we all have to just agree that the words themselves are just descriptions of things and not inherently problematic. But we won't ever do that because it's not polite or acceptable, so this process is never ending.
I think you see this most keenly with terms around disability, where in some cases we’re on our third or fourth generation of new term.
My older brother was born with an extreme form of cerebral palsy and has been quadriplegic all his life. He's happy and his quality of life is good. Things that have made a difference: curb cuts, better wheelchairs, excellent staff in the group home where he lives. Things that have not: whether he is described as "handicapped," "disabled," or something else.
I have seen an absolutely dramatic change in attitudes regarding disabled people since my youth. I’m surprised this isn’t seen as a quality of life issue
Somebody floated "shithole countries" as an alternative a few years back, but for some reason it never really caught on.
Scott Alexander has a good post describing exactly what you're talking about here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/18/the-whole-city-is-center/
Good luck trying to reign in changes in language.
Might as well try herding butterflies.
Lol, who’s trying to prevent language from changing? Maybe reread what I wrote *shrug*
It reminds me of how in high school in the 90s I got confused by people saying we should use “CE” instead of “AD” on the theory that the latter foregrounds religion while the former doesn’t. But you’re still basing the calendar on the supposed year of Christ’s birth! Except now, by not acknowledging what you’re doing, you’re treating it as an agreed-upon fact that this is how the calendar should go (“common era”), whereas at least AD acknowledged it as an explicitly religious distinction, one that nonreligious people can observe without believing.
I prefer CE as Jesus is not my lord, which is what you technically profess whenever you write AD, though I agree its a ridiculously minor quibble. I always tell my students that they can either use BC/AD or BCE/CE but have to be consistent. No mixing ;)
(to your point though - you can always interpret "CE" as "Christian Era" if you wish)
P.S.
CE is also easier because if you're a pedant like me you'd know that AD goes before the year and BC after, which is confusing, whereas both BCE and CE go after so it's easier and more consistent
Some religious Jews of my acquaintance refuse to write AD because they view it as idolatrous.
Some of us aren't too excited by acknowledging 2023 as the "Year of the Lord 2023." You have start counting years somewhere and Jesus's birth is as good as any other, I guess. (Though we non-Christians can smugly point out that you lot got it wrong and are actually off by ~4 years.)
But if everyone wants to switch the year to 5783 we chosen folks will be fine with that. Has a real Star Trek vibe.
Many of our months are named to honor Roman gods and emperors. There's historical baggage with most things.
Happy Wotan Day
Looking forward to Thor's Day tomorrow
Sure, I can't tell you how to feel. I guess for me, the fact that we're arbitrarily going with the ~year of Christ's birth as a place to start counting means that we may as well acknowledge it, and doing so with medieval Latin distances it from anything I actually believe.
Agreed: I don't particularly like that we're using a guess of the year Jesus Christ was born as where to start counting, but I dislike the obscuring of that fact much more.
Who cares? The definition of the meter is that it's one-ten millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole along the meridian through Paris. The bland term "meter" totally obscures that origin and meaning yet I'm okay that people don't keep that origin firmly in mind when watching athletes competing in the 100 meter race (which, btw, is 1/100,000th of the distance from the equator to the North Pole).
It does mean that the circumference of the earth is conveniently 40,000km.
Not applicable to history, of course, but in the natural sciences, time in the past is increasingly rendered BP these days.
Where "Present" is defined as "AD 1950" because that's the date that the calibration samples for radiocarbon dating were taken. This means we are currently in 73 YAP (years after present).
I was always familiar with mya, millions of years ago. Obviously not useful on a time span less than 1 mya, though.
This reminds me of the story about the high school teacher who took his students to a dig where they saw the fossilized bones of an ancient dog embedded in the rocks. The teacher solemnly told them that the fossils were five million and twenty years old. Seeing their confusion, he explained that *his* teacher had taken his class to the same site twenty years ago and told them the bones were five million years old.
Sure. I think I've seen "BP" most frequently in the context of archeology and paleoanthropology. The human connection (we're very much still here) is perhaps why "present" is emphasized.
I find that whole thing rather irksome, honestly, but I find all insistence that we should bend to religious sensitivities irksome.
I think you are engaging in what Matt describes as "getting mad at language change." Yes, these terms keep changing. Yes, there is something extremely arbitrary at the end of the day about what we term offensive and what we term polite. But that's just how language works. It absolutely can get silly ("Latinx"), but if any phrase was ever ripe for retirement, it is "third world." I don't know that many people can identify what the term "second world" used to refer to. The cold war order that these terms referenced doesn't exist in any meaningful way anymore. Is China third world? Also, come on: the term actually is pretty explicitly condescending.
Isn't "South" kind of confusing as well, though? Afghanistan is about the same latitude as Ohio. Mongolia is farther north than that. Singapore is on the Equator and Uruguay is a middle income country.
Another problem with all these terms is I usually have no idea what countries are actually being referred to or often what's being attempted by the grouping. Ethiopia and Argentina and Afghanistan have very little in common with each other, for example, and I can hardly find a reason to try to put them together in some meaningful category.
I've sometimes seen the term "developed South" used to distinguish Argentina, Chile, South Africa, etc.
I think Matt is wrong on this and getting mad at language change can be sensible, particularly when the change is top-down elitism rather than organic.
I agree, particularly when there's often a not-at-all hidden "Newspeak" agenda involved on the part of the people trying to direct the changes in language (see, e.g., gendered language in the context of trans issues).
Totally agree. I'm baffled by the logical leap from "arbitrary and always changing" to it being unreasonable to object to any particular change.
Property rights (to take just one example) are also arbitrary and always changing. Does that mean criticizing new land use restrictions is the lowest form of YIMBY politics?
There's also a huge difference between something's being arbitrary in the sense of its having been willed by nobody in particular, like the grammatical structure of English, and something's being arbitrary in the sense of the willed imposition of one individual or group's preferences on others.
Isn't his whole point here that language change isn't about some sort of normal, acceptable, or organic language change but rather about changing language to create new systems of exclusion?
If we invent new language or change current language because of new knowledge or needs (I dunno - I expect as quantum computing advances language will change in reaction to new knowledge about the universe) it is silly to be mad at that.
But language change that is designed to create new political or social groupings or offer new signal for in-groupness or out-groupness? Seems rational to be mad about that especially if you are in the new outgroup somebody is trying to create.
I think you're largely right about the political dynamics. But another way of looking at it is that when one feels one never has a seat at the table where the new language is being formulated, the neologisms' very existence, to say nothing of the expectation that one will use them, can feel like an insult and a wrong.
That is, there doesn't have to be anything intrinsically objectionable about a phrase like "developing countries"* for conservatives to feel its use as a reminder of their second-class status within the institutions that decide what the "correct" term is going to be. In which case there isn't really any civil conversation to be had about the merits of the terms themselves.
* I've never noticed much in the way of conservative ire about "developing countries" in particular -- maybe I'm just not talking to the right people -- but I'll take it as a valid token of the general phenomenon.
Is there any topic where it makes sense to just get mad and stomp your feet? Of course debating the merits of language changes is a better approach than just grousing about them, but that’s not specific to language--you’re just describing the difference between productive and unproductive discourse.
It was originally "third" in the sense of "third party", ie it was "outside the conflict (of the cold war)". Not just "non-aligned" but also distant.
I tend to prefer "developing countries".
I mean, there's some pretty heavy irony there, considering that these countries weren't even slightly outside of the cold war. They often were very deeply, painfully enmeshed in the cold war as client states.
Regardless, I tend to favor "developing" as well. To the extent that any umbrella term makes sense, it seems meaningful to characterize countries by measures like their level of industrialization and per-capita GDP.
Ah, well, the Non-Aligned Movement was originally Yugoslavia, India, Egypt, Ghana and Indonesia. Most African nations were still First World, being colonies of NATO members in 1961.
The massive expansion of decolonisation and the clientelism was still in the future when the term was invented.
In contrast to the no longer or scarcely developing countries. :)
When I was first taught the term, it was UDCs for "under-developed countries".
But developing vs developed is a useful distinction, as long as you bear in mind that, like any simple binary, it simplifies and conceals a lot of complexity.
UCD or "developing" can be useful if you know your audience and you're all on the same page. But it's more often still fraught with danger.
Suppose MY mentioned "developing countries" in a post without much further clarification. You and I could have wildly different ideas on which countries and areas of the world that means.
I think it would be clearer than “global south” or “third world”.
Was LDC's before or after? :)
I don't use the term "Third World" much because I agree that it's lost relevance since the end of the Cold War, but I would dispute that the term was "pretty explicitly condescending" -- it was coined by a French historian (Alfred Sauvy) in 1952 to describe countries that stood outside the East vs. West frame of the Cold War and, per him, was inspired by the French concept of the "Third Estate," and I think also pretty clearly influenced by the concept of the "Third Way," which was a term often used in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries to describe a path between capitalism and socialism/communism.
China was second world IIRC. And it seems to me that the "getting mad at language change" gripe is equally applicable to "getting mad at language" argument- it all depends on context. "Third world" wasn't objectionable until it was- folks had to decide that it was actually problematic. The condescension you're highlighting can be inferred if you want to, but you can just as easily infer condescension in literally any terminology that applies to as broad a group as the term is referencing. Global south doesn't strike me as inherently less condescending, it's just that the folks who infer condescension in TW have decided, for the moment, not to infer it in GS.
Personally, I'm with you in that getting upset about the changes is silly to an extent. When the purpose of the language change is to be able to easily identify undesirables or those with backwards/ignorant thinking so that we can condemn them then it can get problematic, but if we don't do that then whatever, who cares. But spending time pretending that calling a country one from the GS as opposed calling it TW makes literally any difference whatsoever to the world and lived experiences of anyone living in it strikes me as pretty silly.
“Third world” became problematic precisely at the end of the Cold War, because it was specifically a Cold War term.
On the other hand, "Global South" was an inaccurate term the day it was coined since it excludes literal Australia, the continent named for being Southerly!
(I actually sympathize with the idea that First / Second / Third world had technical connotations specific to the Cold War that are worth preserving for the sake of precision, but the general point that we as a society stopped using "Third World" for aggravating euphemism treadmill reasons instead of meritorious reasons of technical precision is reasonably self-evident. On the other hand, at least developing / developed nation status allows for granularity based on the metrics that people are actually referring to when they use these terms, so I'll give that terminology a bye.)
How are you defining problematic? As someone who was alive in the 90s, I can say that I never once heard anyone claim it was "problematic" once the wall came down, at least not in the way that term seems to be being used in this context. I think it's fair to say we should stop using it because it's not an accurate term anymore post-cold war, but that's different than claiming it's condescending or insulting in some way that GS isn't.
Yeah, the inaccuracy thing was the reason I stopped using it in the 1990s.
It’s weird to call developing countries “third world” when it includes Soviet Bloc nations! This was a useful affectation in debate class, since it made me look smarter and more thoughtful. And more pedantic.
Honestly, it was a language choice that gave you everything you could ever want in HS debate.
This is maybe the best explanation for my "third-world" should reasonably be deprecated in favor of "the global south", so thanks! So much so, in fact, that I'm not sure you really need the final sentence. Condescension is a matter of felt implication, and not, I think, necessarily inherent in the concatenation of "third" and "world", ipso facto. Honestly the first time I heard the term when I was young I thought it just meant "Earth", since there's Mercury and Venus before us.
It's true that the term is defunct on the merits, but I think it would be disingenuous to ignore the implied (?) hierarchy in the term. Some terms change over time simply because they become dated or acquire associations (colored, Afro-American, African American, Black), and it's hard to argue that the phrases are inherently distasteful. But third world? Eh, I'm pretty sure India didn't come up with that one.
Except we do need hierarchies! Certainly the term lost some of its utility after the end of the Cold War, but I still think it’s useful to distinguish , strong , competent , but evil regimes (China) from failed states (Somalia) and both from good (politically free, socially stable, economically prosperous) countries (Sweden). I don’t think we need to apologize for creating terms reflecting these value judgments. I do agree though that we might need something more up to date than third world.
Why is it explicitly condescending? Don’t get it.
It’s at least partially the euphemism treadmill.
“Third world” describes a set of conditions that are bad and, so, come to have deeply negative meanings its elites would like to avoid.
So a new word is devised which soon, because it is a word for something negative, gathers the same baggage and becomes unacceptable as well.
The baggage itself is, taking from Matt’s piece, mostly that people at least kind of agree that it takes centuries to make a gentleman. Your doctor who came from moderate means in a country of few would like to portray themselves as inheriting something glorious, not as the son of a grain dealer who was prosperous for a place where many people don’t have whatever basic thing it would be comically embarrassing to lack.
After all, this is America and most people here see that kind of story as creating authenticity. But that whole concept seems to be more for college admissions essays these days.
Why can't we just give everyone the benefit of the doubt? After all, just conversing about these issues indicates a willingness to learn in most cases. As for those who intentionally use racist language to display actual racist attitudes, well, Jesus said "love your neighbor."
I'm not convinced that judging people for attitudes has that much to do with addressing systemic racism baked into laws, lending algorithms, employment traditions etc. For example, it's probably more effective to formally discipline employees who harass their female colleagues and use racist language with the intent of offending fellow employees, then to try to convince or shame people into changing their internal biases and attitudes.
I get the annoyance on one hand but is anyone actually saying that to your face?
If the words “third world” offend you, your offense meter is broken
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).
I think this is well said.
If white, moneyed neighborhoods had the level of violence that law abiding citizens are surrounded by in poor, black neighborhoods, then we would accept fascism as an alternative. An actual police state, whatever it took to make it stop. It really is horrifying.
The black property owners in Clayton County, Georgia agree, and keep electing Victor Hill to the shirerevalty so the Clayton County Jail can remain “America’s toughest military prison.”
Wow, I was completely unaware that there was a single word term for the office of sheriff (although Google says it's spelled, "shrievalty").
The word was originally shire-reeve (well, it was scirgerefa, but the modern words "shire" - ie county, and "reeve" - ie government official, come from scir and gerefa).
As is often true in English, odd spellings and pronunciations make more sense if you know the etymology.
Richard Hanania and others (and as Matt kind of has here) have similarly framed these types of beliefs and behaviors as a form of status competition between elites to see who can understand the most vanguard-y terms, ideas, etc.
It’s also a way of laundering class privilege. You can say “I sent my child to a progressive school that had a diverse class” and leave out the fact that poor whites need not apply
what exactly do you mean by “upper class?”
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.
I think the point is that people whose job is to think about this stuff have strong incentives to innovate and make novel contributions to the field. But that quest for novelty becomes stressful and difficult to others down the food chain.
It seems like this arms race to innovate could eventually come crashing down in discrediting manners when the people they're trying to innovate on behalf of strongly reject the innovation. Something that's even stronger than, say, Ruben Gallego's famous rejection of Latinx.
I think you’re in part right. You’re saying this is mostly organic. But there is a part of it that’s deliberate. I was in a DEI training (mandatory) and the trainer said we no longer say ally we now say something else. It apparently didn’t catch one. But one of my woke colleagues (she was really focused on trans issues) thought it was so great. I thought it was the same thing using different words. The point is people feel like they’re making a contribution by changing these words. It’s become a thing onto itself. Most of my liberal colleagues have gotten to the point where it’s annoying. We literally laugh about it. You now shouldn’t say master plan. In my work, this is common. Purging it takes real effort. Does it really do anything?
But the DEI folks have to do something. The managers have 6 figure salaries and offices...they can’t say well we did what we could... I guess we’re done now. They want to stay employed. As Matt just said there is quickly diminishing returns to where your efforts are increasingly meaningless.
We should re-train the DEI workers as home builders. A case could be made that many more homes would do more for their stated goals than “the work” (as they love to call it), than what they do now.
I bet the new word was “accomplice”… https://divonify.com/articles/ally-vs-accomplice
That sounds right. They were very excited about it.
Jesus christ, what I immediately think of when I hear that is "partner in crime".
Yes I think that is the idea, more than just a friend but someone who is willing to break unjust rules and cause “good trouble.” It’s all just play-acting… Jeff Maurer had a fantastic piece on this a while back but sadly I can’t find it :(
I first noticed this with "microaggression," but I think it's interesting every time, especially because it tends to accompany a flattening of the definition that eliminates the nuance that the term was originally meant to have. I think this is just an inevitable part of mass use, but it's just particularly striking when it comes to concepts that were originally meant to have a very specific meaning.
Yeah I agree with this. In general I feel like etiquette operates at the individual and small group level, and to an extent within corporate structures, while oppression is an extensive set of systems. Is misgendering someone repeatedly/deliberately when you know better really a "microaggression"? Like you say I think that flattens the meaning and usefulness.
Shouldn't we have harsh words for harsh realities? Slavery isn't a unique cultural experience, it's brutal forced labor for economic gain. It's dehumanizing and that's the point. Sanitizing the language is a bit to close to sanitizing history.
This is way too much clumsy messing with language. You don't have to fully flesh out the potential ramifications of every word while using the word. That's what sentences, with adjectives, etc. are for.
Should there be a new word for casualties of war that fully describes the horrific physical and mental injuries suffered? If I say 800,000 soldiers died in civil war or 20,000 died in the revolution is that sanitizing history? Should we say instead: "20,000 persons who's bodies suffered traumatic injuries sufficient to produce death, or whose camp conditions facilitated the spread of diseases which cause them to suffer agonizing deaths in mental and physical pain as their bowels leaked and / or brain functions deteriorated"
Should there be a new word for serfs who were forced by law to live and work on the land of their masters, often resulting in starvation? "Persons held in serfdom" is that better ( for some reason? )
Ha, yes, I've brought up the "enserfed person" question at Slate before on this topic. There are literally hundreds of words you can do this with and I can't begin to understand how anyone thinks it's actually helping anything as compared to just sounding like more and more bureaucrat-ese.
That’s exactly the point. Calling someone a “slave” sanitizes it, while saying they “were enslaved” makes clear that there was a harsh and continuing process involved in keeping them enslaved.
I have literally a 100% opposite view -- calling someone a "slave" sounds harsh and jarring; calling someone an "enslaved person" is mushmouthed euphemism treadmill stuff.
Consider these statements:
"I will not be a slave!"
"I will not be an enslaved person!"
Which one has more punch?
This goal of "packing punch" through word definitions is a horrible goal and progressives are constantly wasting everyone's time with it.
The point of words, and the natural tendency of their evolution, is to carry a useful bit of information. You know what the word slave means, I know what the word slaves mean thus we can communicate. If it's useful in the context to explain more about the slave experience, or emphasize its horribleness - than write more sentences!
By analogy - we both know what kidnapping is. Now suppose one of use had been kidnapped or our child had been. The word "kidnapping" by itself, probably does little justice to how psychologically scarring that experience would have been. But if we needed to get the across, the proper remedy is not to invent a better euphemism - it's just to describe the experience.
"This goal of 'packing punch' through word definitions is a horrible goal and progressives are constantly wasting everyone's time with it."
I don't personally have that as a goal. My point is simply that the only justification I've seen given for "enslaved person" is that it is supposedly more "powerful" because it uses the word "person" in it. [Insert 5000 word essay on "person-centered language" here.] I find that completely unconvincing -- if the goal is to jar, shock, etc. the listener, the word "slave" does that. "Enslaved person" says to me, "Here's a PowerPoint."
Unfortunately it's taking over wikipedia articles on Slavery in the United States. I'm on a civil war history kick right now, and I'm seeing the awkward "enslaved person" about 60% or so.
There's a guy who used to post here occasionally who had an interesting substack post about this recently: https://klaussimplifies.substack.com/p/words-dont-technically-mean-anything
That is wonderfully on point, thank you.
Try:‘[Slavemaster] owned 100 slaves’
vs
‘[Slavemaster] enslaved 100 people’
I did say ‘in certain contexts’ for a reason. I agree in your example the change is completely worse! I don’t think the change should be a rule, it’s just a better frame in a small number of settings/discussions/circumstances.
Both seem pretty damn harsh to me, but...*shrug emoji*
Really, calling someone a slave sanitizes it? As a person with some libertarian views on freedom, I find it hard to see how the word slave can be sanitized.
Maybe there is some advanced rhetorical thinking that my mind just can’t process. This feels like Eric Weinstein mathematics applied to vocabulary.
Yes. It completely erases the role of the people who were doing the enslaving. It’s the kind of thing that people who complain about the passive voice are actually complaining about. (The passive voice is actually used in this example to emphasize that this is a transitive verb.)
It erases the role of the enslavers? You really believe that's accurate?
Again - this is not how language works. You're using "erase" as an active verb. If I say I am an amputee, that doesn't "erase the role of whatever took my limb". It's merely an accurate description of my condition, awaiting further clarification (how? which limb? when? who?) or description or blame.
And of course most people of normal intelligence know my arm didn't fall of one day while I was walking down the street, just as anyone with 2 brain cells knows a slave, by definition, is "owned" by another person. "Enslaved person" gives no further information, it's exactly the kind of shibboleth Matt wrote about in today's post.
I’m with Wigan here. When I read the word slave - I don’t assume that is a state that occurred without a cause. I think RC hit on the motivation for using this language better than this take.
I think that, in the modern parlance, the difference is that 'enslaved peoples' usually means 'black people who were enslaved by white people', while 'slave' is a generic term for the condition of enslavement. i.e., the latter was a common condition throughout history, while the former is central to the ongoing discussion-argument-debate over the history and founding of the United States. So, in that context, 'slave' is sanitizing because it is a broader category, sort of like the difference between 'violent crime' and 'murder'.
"the difference is that 'enslaved peoples' usually means 'black people who were enslaved by white people', while 'slave' is a generic term for the condition of enslavement."
Is that a distinction that's being drawn by the terms? While I've certainly seen the argument that slavery as practiced in the US was uniquely bad (which I think is disputable in a number of ways), I've never seen someone use different terminology like that, which seems like it would be problematic in its own way as dehumanizing non-black slaves.
I don't know that the lexicon is that rigorous, but I do think that there is a pattern of adopting phrasing that highlights the oppressor/oppressed dynamic, like describing any unequal power relationship as a subset of 'white supremacy'. I do know from personal experience that the kind of people who adopt this lexicon tend to dismiss the notion that slavery isn't 'real' unless it fits that dynamic, ipso facto the blanket descriptor 'slavery' is sanitized language.
Slavery was so common throughout human history that even my Southern European ancestors were enslaved as late as the late 18th-early 18th century. Some historians argue that the resulting centuries of economic depression were a contributing factor in the eventual mass emigration from the region that brought my antecedents to the US. But since we are now considered white, discussing this form of slavery is considered a right-wing talking point meant only to minimize the trauma of the African slave trade. And, fair enough, the book I read on the topic was reviewed by National Review (but written by a history professor who studies the topic); it's not a collective trauma shared by an ethnic group; it never reached the scale of the African slave trade, which was a particularly brutal, international and financialized era of slavery; and my antecedents are retroactively considered capital W-white, which redounds to my benefit.
Interesting, do this a kind of centering a specific group. The logic then becomes if that group is not centered than sanitation is occurring. This is consistent with acknowledging many groups having had enslaved peoples is bad because we should stay focused on a specific group. Okay, I see how the word sanitized is being used. I still don’t agree with that view but at least I understand now.
I think that's right. A counter example is 'patriarchy', which is unambiguous with respect to the two groups; men oppressing women. (Of course, in woke-speak it has a much less precise, more complex and shifting definition and somehow also involves race now.) In this context 'sanitizing' means 'phrased in a way that does not incriminate (a specific group)'.
No, it doesn't sanitizes it, it's the noun that defines what that person was in the society they lived in. That's what language is for and how it works. We don't need to replace existing nouns with clumsy euphemisms to describe slavery. Instead you can, you know, describe slavery. It's like what I hear other parents tell their toddlers "use your words"
Does using the term "the holocaust" sanitize the Holocaust? Does using the word "genocide" sanitize things - do we need to replace "the Armenian Genocide" with "the communal murder and rape and terrorizing of more than 1.5 million Armenians" to de-sanitize it?
Feels humanizing to me. Similar to "person experiencing homelessness". Obviously the language isn't as definitive as intended.
I’d refer you to Richard’s comment here -
https://www.slowboring.com/p/who-is-included-by-inclusive-language/comment/12002474
The point I was making was that in some contexts it can be more insightful to say ‘X enslaved people’ and some makes no difference compared to ‘had slaves’. I don’t think the word ‘slaves’ is too harsh or anything like that.
I was then extrapolating to say -particularly within certain institutions- that one might imagine how ‘sometimes enslaved is a better way to express this in some work’ becomes ‘we use the word enslaved here’ and then becomes ‘don’t say slave’ through a combination of repetition and people getting things slightly wrong.
I agree that ‘person experiencing homeless’ does nothing very useful.
I’d refer you to Richard’s comment here -
https://www.slowboring.com/p/who-is-included-by-inclusive-language/comment/12002474
The point I was making was that in some contexts it can be more insightful to say ‘X enslaved people’ and some makes no difference compared to ‘had slaves’. I don’t think the word ‘slaves’ is too harsh or anything like that.
I was then extrapolating to say -particularly within certain institutions- that one might imagine how ‘sometimes enslaved is a better way to express this in some work’ becomes ‘we use the word enslaved here’ and then becomes ‘don’t say slave’ through a combination of repetition and people getting things slightly wrong.
I agree that ‘person experiencing homeless’ does nothing very useful.
Richard C helpfully linked this below, but I'm reposting here because it's so well-written and better says what I was trying to say in my several comments here.
https://klaussimplifies.substack.com/p/words-dont-technically-mean-anything
> 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.
Is that interesting?
I think that between "Thomas Jefferson owned over 600 slaves" and "Thomas Jefferson enslaved over 600 people", the latter makes a considerably stronger statement.
The latter is also misleading, because it implies he made 600 free people into slaves, which is what "enslaved" usually means as a transitive verb (I just checked a bunch of online dictionaries: some allow "hold someone in bondage" as a secondary meaning, but all give "force someone into bondage" as the primary meaning). I see from https://www.monticello.org/slavery/slavery-faqs/property/ that he inherited 175 slaves, bought another ~20, and acquired the rest from "the natural increase of enslaved families". At the time it was the law of Virginia that the children of enslaved women were born into slavery, so I think it's misleading even to say that Jefferson enslaved the remaining 400. "Jefferson owned over 600 enslaved people", though inelegant, is at least accurate and non-misleading.
I believe he was legally permitted to free any of them at any time, and chose not to.
Which is in no sense the same as his having enslaved them, within the ordinary meaning of the word.
Yep! Or at least, he freed only a tiny handful. I'm absolutely not defending the guy.
You are overestimating median practitioners eloquence. It’s more likely to be “Jefferson owned 600 enslaved-persons” and going to sound stupid and pc. But yes- yours is the better way to go about it, although I’d argue both frames are actually correct and useful. He did own slaves and that allowed to a legal-historical relaity that enslaving peole glosses over somewhat.
Yes the historical use of the word slaves in documents at the time is important. I also think "he enslaved people" is less true of Jefferson to my knowledge than of, say, Columbus. By the time Jefferson or his father or whoever bought them they were already enslaved, unless they were born at Monticello in which case they never experienced any other condition. I don't necessarily find the word "own" in this context very exculpatory but it is interesting to realize that some people might.
Good point ! I’d rather think “own”’is (or ought to be!) jarring when referring to people. All in all I think that between the two sentences while Gadsden’s might be more likely to start a debate (which is certainly a good thing in some cases!), the original one actually states the case with greater clarity and historical precision.
I absolutely agree that treating it as a shibboleth is just silly. The point, I think (and the original one a couple of comments ago) is that the way I put it rephrases it in a striking way that, because it's non-standard, makes the listener stop and think more.
By turning that into a standard phrasing that is used all the time without thought, you defeat the actual point of what the originators were trying to do.
Makes the listener stop and think more about what, exactly?
Strong agree with exactly this point. The interesting reframing encounters the urge from certain quarters to ensure one is broadcasting that they are sensitive and caring to these things and turns it to mush.
The only way the latter makes a stronger statement is insofar as it implies an assertion that is empirically false. Once people come to understand that by [B] you just mean [A], whatever extra rhetorical force [B] had will be lost.
I think to highlight that one person *owns* another person packs a significant punch as well. I'm not sure one version so clearly out-performs the other.
But it emphasizes the fact that he was continually complicit in their enslavement.
if by emphasize, you mean it says a completely different thing, and that thing is probably false, then yes, it totally emphasizes a fact.
It’s perhaps not *that* interesting, but in its proper context I think yes!
As a descendant of slaves I think it's interesting to discuss it and to think about the dehumanizing potential of the word "slaves" but extremely boring and at best low-hanging fruit to go around yelling at slightly less educated or well read people ESPECIALLY other black people not to say the word "slave" anymore. Like in its secondary context I think it's intended as a remedy for dehumanization and I think it fails in that similarly to phrases like "person with autism" that are now not really used in-community. I felt this way about "African-American" as a child- not bc there was anything wrong with the word but because I could sense the effort of older white people to remember the "better" word. I couldn't articulate why it bothered me; today I tend to bring up my Caribbean heritage and that there's nothing wrong with being Black but really it's just a gut feeling that racism isn't about being mean and impolite.
I agree, and would add also a second point you may allude to: that this has the danger of venturing into the realm of euphemism. This of course is more problematic when used for positive or neutral terms (someone’s heritage) but can be problematic even for negative terms for the fear of sanitizing history. Slavery *was* the ultimate form of dehumanization, and there is no way of changing that blight on our history. I think we need to strike the tricky balance between talking about then history in a way that recalls- indeed emphasizes - the humanity of the enslaved and the injustice they incurred- on one hand but on the other not to shy way form precise sharp historical terms describing the situation in its exact horror. I thus think master/slaves shouldn’t be shunned altogether but used with care and within context.
Yes I agree completely. I also think it presents different problems for different groups of readers. Within black communities I think it's much less common to have forgotten that the people in all the paintings and daguerreotypes who look like you and your family were people, and.the history of Jim Crow is still close enough generationally that these things don't feel theoretical. Like most things it's more complex than just memorizing current etiquette haha. I like the way you explained that aspect because it is part of what I was trying to get at.
I have a hard time seeing how substituting "enslaved people" for "slaves" is anything other than an absolute loss in accuracy and precision. That is, I don't see it as a matter of context: I can't imagine any context in which that would be an "interesting reframing" and not just an addition of, at best, unnecessary linguistic ambiguity.
To take an example discussed elsewhere in this comment thread, suppose we said of Thomas Jefferson that he "owned X many enslaved people" or even that he "enslaved X many people." The first is unclear as to whether it refers only to people who became slaves during their lifetime, or is instead meant to include people born into slavery as well -- about whom it's confusing to say they were "enslaved," since there was never a time when they didn't have the juridical status of slaves.
The second -- that Jefferson "enslaved" X many people -- is clearly even worse. If Jefferson acquired some slaves by purchase, then they were already enslaved as a matter of the positive law of that time and place. If the idea is that Jefferson could've freed them but didn't, the only way he could've acquired the ability to do such a thing is if the seller had the power to transfer his or her property rights in them to Jefferson -- which again presupposes their having already been slaves in a positive-law sense.
If the point is that they were never truly slaves because as a matter of natural law (or, as we now tend to say, human rights) no human being can be the property of another, then by the same logic they were never truly "enslaved" either.
So I guess I don't see what exactly the reframing is meant to accomplish.
I also am incapable of understanding the point. Doesn't slaves literally just mean "enslaved people"? If the point of the parent comment was to subtly point out how useless DEI practitioners are, well they accomplished it.
"without anyone having consciously decreed that"
Isn't a major part of the issue that someone -- very often the AP Style Guide -- does consciously decree that? E.g., the overnight flip in many publications to capitalizing "Black," but not "white" when describing racial groups?
This happens in many fields, in different shapes and fashions. The Harvard Business Review has kept itself relevant by every three or four years sponsoring the hot new catchphrase or One Weird Trick for reinventing your business. These come from huckster consultant types who float the New Think in an article and after that a hot new book that all CEOs and their acolytes have to read and seed their conversation with lest they seem out of touch and ripe for their board to consider replacing.
And, of course, there's never any real substance behind it. That would take actual, honest work, which these hucksters aren't too keen on.
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.
I may be a party of one on this, but I've always felt a bit of regret at the loss of "he" to refer to the third person singular of non-defined gender. My understanding is the use of "they" in this case has a long pedigree in English, and was probably becoming more common long before gender politics weighed in. But still, for quite some time—at least well into the 1970s I think — "he" was acceptable (and indeed preferred) as the standard in formal English. Its loss in my view is one that makes the language ever so slightly less elegant.
But relatedly, if everyone was aware that "he" could refer to either a male or female (yes, one is aware in 2023 people don't always self-label themselves with one of these two choices), where was the sexism. To put it another way, if everyone knows "he" is used to refer to either gender by convention, it's doesn't exclude women. So what's sexist about it?
Also relatedly, I've long thought a nice compromise would be for people to simply choose whichever third person singular pronoun they prefer or personally use; or mix it up; but just don't banish "he" — it was economical and made sense. But that ship has mostly sailed, at least in on the western side of the Atlantic. I often use "she" now as my default because I know I won't catch flack, and because "they" grates.
As a woman, I don’t like gender-neutral “he” - even as a small child, it made me feel as if I wasn’t meant to envision myself, a girl, as whomever “he” was. It’s never felt gender-neutral and I know I’m not the only woman who feels that way. I’ve spent my life telling people I’m a she, not a he, and the people of the world spend a lot of time telling me I’m a she, not a he - why would a single grammatical exception except that? I would sacrifice “elegance” for that. In fact, as a reader, to me the gender-neutral “he” isn’t elegant - it’s jarring and suggests that whatever was written was written anticipating a male reader, even if it’s technically for everyone.
I recommend you explore the concept of “male as default” that feminists discuss. The slow elimination of gender-neutral “he” is a product of pushing against that. It’s not the largest problem, for sure (things like car safety mechanisms being calibrated for the height and weight of the average male despite being more unsafe for the average female, for example) - but it’s downhill from that.
This is actually a perfect example of why being more "inclusive" has real merit. Thank you for this.
A lot of this substack is oriented towards pushing back on the most obnoxious parts of more left wing overreach regarding language and DEI, a lot of which I agree with.
But your post is good pushback that a lot of the impetus (if not the actual work by people like Robin DeAngelo) has real merit; there really is good reason(s) to be more inclusive even if it seems like something supposedly small like the usage of the word "he'.
When a text uses "she" where someone 20 years ago would have used "he" (as a "gender-neutral" term) I find it jarring, so I find it easy to believe that the inverse (the default "he") feels jarring to women.
(And my young daughter has expressed frustration that so much defaults to 'he' so it's definitely not just 'woke elites')
My young daughters are the same and as a parent I understand the frustration.
We were reading Goodnight, Goodnight Construction Site and every single construction vehicle is a "he", for no good reason. (Are we going to pretend the female Dump Trucks are all homemakers or...what?)
Interestingly, I'm guessing the authors received a lot of feedback on that because their next book, Steam Train Dream Train is completely gender-free. That is, gender is never mentioned.
>>it’s jarring and suggests that whatever was written was written anticipating a male reader
Not to me it doesn't. But I think it's fine for different people to possess different aesthetics. As I wrote above, my usual default is "she" — it avoids triggering people, and it likewise avoids the clunkiness of using a form that evolved to denote the plural as a singular.
I suspect that your use of "she" also triggers people just as much, they just don't get on-line and complain about it.
Could be. I've noticed this use of "she" has grown quite popular. Matt frequently employs it (though I noticed—gasp!—our host used "he" in this capacity recently).
It’s also just weird that English doesn’t have a gender-neutral singular pronoun. Plenty of other languages do.
The only other language I speak is Swahili. I love how I can tell a whole story about a person in swahili without giving away their gender. And it feels totally natural - I don’t miss it at all.
English does have a gender-neutral singular pronoun: "it." But people normally don't use it for humans. We use that word for squirrels, birds, trees, etc.
"They" is the older term for people of indeterminate gender; the insistence on "he" is one of those cases where grammarians of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries pushed for Latinate grammar rules whose reasoning really derives from elements structure of the Latin language (like "prepositions don't end sentences" and "no split infinitives") that don't exist in English.
One of the sillinesses of the arguments over "they" is that singular they for a person of indeterminate gender is genuinely ancient (and appears in Shakespeare and the King James Bible and so on), but singular they for a specific person whose determinate gender is non-binary is very modern and is a genuine innovation. People objecting to the innovation as "singular they" get the Shakespeare quotes thrown at them and know they are different but can't express how because they lack the grammatical language to express it. Most of the people defending personal they also don't realise that it's an actual novelty and think it's the same as the old indeterminate singular they.
Personally: I'd prefer it if we adopted two new singular personal pronouns, one for indeterminate gender and one for known non-binary gender. But innovating one personal pronoun was last done during the Viking invasions in the 800s AD, so it's not likely to happen.
I do wonder how long it'll be before "they all" starts cropping up to emphasise the plurality of they.
"Personally: I'd prefer it if we adopted two new singular personal pronouns, one for indeterminate gender and one for known non-binary gender."
We already have a pronoun for objects known to exhibit neither male nor female characteristics: "it". I think it's pretty obvious why non-binary personages don't ask for that pronoun.
I was taught at school (in the 1980s) that English has four grammatical genders: masculine, feminine, neuter and common. It has only three singular third-person pronouns (he, she and it), meaning that for anything in common gender, you had to use "he or she" or "s/he", but you should generally use a circumlocution to avoid the pronoun (passive voice, or pluralise). Also that "they" would be acceptable in some circumstances, but not in the highest levels of published writing.
"Common", as my teacher had it, is what I was referring to as "indeterminate gender" above. Neuter is only to be used for non-human objects (and, it is more respectful to use "he" or "she" for animals when the gender is known, but you don't have to respect an animal, while you do have to respect a human).
>>one of those cases where grammarians of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries pushed for Latinate grammar rules<<
Quite right. Same for the "rule" against a phrase like "Bob and me are in the kitchen." Thanks for pointing this out. But sometimes those old classicists had a point. For the record I'm about as far from a restrictionist on matters related to the English language as one can be, I think. My preference for using the 3rd person singular (of either gender) over "they" is purely aesthetic in nature.
In some other languages, where grammatical gender has less to do with personal identity (“das Mädchen”, “der Mensch” is masculine, and “die junge Frau” is feminine, and all can refer to the same person) it’s much easier to hear this as a pure syntactic feature. But in English, the pronoun almost always gets its gender from the referent, and not from the prior word that it is anaphoric on.
This has been a gradual process. It wasn’t as strongly established in Early Modern English. I once found a recipe for “cock ale” (btw, one supposed etymology for the word “cocktail”) that began “Take a cock and boil him in ale.” Contemporary English speakers would never refer to food with a non-neuter gendered pronoun, but at that time the word was gendered so the pronoun would be.
Well, they might well refer to an animal as "him" (or "her")! I assume the word back then referred to male fowl as it does today?
I grew up longer ago than I care to admit, but I remember in school learning to use "he/she" or "he or she".
There was also the clever (s)he.
I've always found the default he bad for the reasons Lisa C said, and at the same time find the singular they grating, as you do, despite Richard's contrary points. Though I do agree with Richard that we need to invent some new pronouns, and it's a damn shame that we probably won't be able to agree on what those are.
I'll be 50 in a couple of months and I find personal singular they grates, even as I have friends who use it now. Indeterminate singular they seems more natural than indeterminate singular he to me, though.
My guess is that we invent a new plural third person pronoun, probably "they all" on the model of "you all" and come to reserve "they" for exclusively singular uses.
Yes, I can somewhat swallow the indeterminate case, although I try really hard to either pluralize the indeterminate example, or avoid pronouns altogether. But the personal case is really bad, especially when it's always followed by using plural conjugations of be. Start saying they is, and there might be a way to get to some compromise.
I'm sure you'll be "happy" to know the process is still ongoing, with lots of new targets!
Like you I have mixed feelings: I think in general even software developers should be thoughtful about language, but Matt's thesis is mostly right they in practice it serves as a way to separate those who are in the know from the rest of us.
I think it's perfectly reasonable for folks to avoid using "master/slave" for identifying servers, and in the context of servers "primary/replica" is probably not *too* snooty. And changing black/whitelist to block/allowlist actually feels a lot more legible to me. What strikes me is that both of those actually replace a term with something clearer that doesn't rely on an allusion to slavery (I don't actually know the etymology behind either the examples I gave but reading them as problematic feels pretty reasonable)
I haven’t looked it up but I don’t think think blacklist / whitelist has anything to do with slavery, it’s more akin to the idea of a “black mark” as being a demerit, and then whitelist is just a back-formation from “blacklist” because we needed a less awkward term than “inverse blacklist.”
Edit: seems like this is basically right
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacklisting
Right, but I think that's kinda my point: the block/allow is clearer in the context it's being used and doesn't rely on being familiar with the allusion, thus removing one particular avenue for confusion, so seems a reasonable shift to me?
Like contrived example, say the person who popularized that in software was really into signal processing and decided to allude to high-pass/low-pass filters instead. You'd have to remember arbitrarily which term was which. That's what black/white list does, and so the idea that "black means bad and white means good" is the heuristic we're choosing to reinforce is something I can at least see bothering someone. Changing to language that is *more clear* feels like a reasonable thing to do on the merits.
Changing branch names in the repo from "master" to "main" is one I'm far more ambivalent about, though, or at least make them more descriptive (develop/testing/release, etc).
That’s probably true, but it’s still clearer to say “blocklist” and “allowlist” for users who might not know whether a “black mark” or a “white mark” is the good one. (Users may soon be as likely to be from China or Africa as the United States.)
I'm not saying that "blocklist" and "allowlist" are bad terminology per se, but I think there's a case to be made here that native speakers of English (both technical and lay) are allowed to retain their idioms.
Blacklist and whitelist are references to light - a blacklist blocks everything (which is how we get the color black), while a whitelist lets things through (white light is all of the colors combined).
The most important language skills that coders should have is to write code that is highly descriptive, so that any people that have no experience with the code you've written can easily understand it if they need or want to work on it.
This is somewhat language-dependent though. Descriptive variable and function names are great, but it's *really hard* to make anything involving pointers intuitively clear. There's a lot to be said for comments.
This is correct, there's always limits to some aspects, and while I'm a fan of concise usage of comments they are very much part of writing highly descriptive code.
I joked (but maybe wasn't joking) once on Twitter that if I had to list my 10 most significant lines of code in my professional career, at least half of them are comments explaining in some form that "No, what you're thinking about doing looking at this will not work and yes, you will regret it if you try to do it" or "This sections offends my sensibilities, too, but _do not touch it or else_"
As someone else who has been involved in those discussions, I'm glad you pushed for them, and I think you should feel more positive about your role.
I think the biggest reason that things have moved on in potentially unhelpful directions is that we haven't succeeded in making real change in how inclusive our communities are. In the face of that failure, people are going to keep trying things, even if they aren't helpful.
Tangential query: Is the caller in this context the invoking thread or process or a person using an API? I feel like I would usually use “it” (or maybe “they” if I need to personify the caller for some reason) by default in these cases, so much so that I would generally view references to “he” as most likely the contribution of ESL speakers. (I noticed when I worked in engineering with various people from different primary linguistic backgrounds that they would often use “this guy” to refer to things that lacked natural gender for which they wanted a temporary referent, which never stopped being slightly bemusing…)
You're right, if it was referring to another function it should be an "it", vs. an unknown programmer being a singular they.
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.
It's absolutely middle class, in that the upper class doesn't care so much. The British upper class would be equally comfortable with "the heads are in the stern", "lavatories are in the rear" or "the toilets are in the back" (restroom is an Americanism, so I switched to the British equivalent). An actual working-class vulgarism ("the shitter is up back") would be unacceptable, though.
This is not to say there aren't matters of manners or etiquette that the upper-class cares enormously about and that are different from the middle-class. It's just that they are different ones from the ones that the middle-class obsesses about.
Examples for upper class etiquette obsessions?
Lots of rural country stuff. Like it's inappropriate to wear an entirely new outfit in the country; you're supposed to have had your Barbour jacket and Hunter wellies for years. Of course, you occasionally need to replace something, so you might be wearing one new item, but all new is a bit gauche, isn't it?
[If you're wondering why the British upper-class hates Meghan Markle so much, a large part of it is that she didn't give a shit about most of this kind of nonsense. Another large part is their racism, of course. Kate "doors to manual" Middleton got similar snobbery, but she submitted to it and learned to come up to their standards]
Wait. , Kate isn’t upper class? Forgive me for my utter ignorance on this consequential topic ;)
Obviously, Her Royal Highness, the Princess of Wales is upper class now.
Her parents were a flight dispatcher and a flight attendant. When she was five, they founded a mail order company that (eventually) made them multi-millionaires. Her father comes from an upper-class family (he had a trust fund and inheritance, but not enough to live off without working), but her mother's family were coal miners (her grandfather was a trucker, but his father worked in the pit)
"Doors to manual" (a flight attendant reference) was something that was said behind Kate's back a lot by upper-class acquaintances of William when they first started dating (they appear to have stopped since the marriage).
They had money and sent all their children to Marlborough (a public boarding school, one of the first to become fully co-educational in 1989).
By the usual British standards, Kate's parents are upper-middle (you can't get higher than that with just money), she was (before marriage) arguably upper-class as she had an upper-class education* and has inherited wealth, but if so, she's first generation and isn't fully accepted. If she'd married a "normal" upper-class man, then their children would have been entirely upper-class. Obviously, she married William which changes the calculation - as Princess of Wales, she sets upper-class manners and fashions, rather than following them.
*Marlborough and St Andrews is about as upper-class as it gets for a woman of her age who isn't academic enough to get into Oxbridge. A man of similar academic talent, such as her husband, might have Eton and St Andrews instead. One with higher academic ability would, presumably, go to Oxbridge. At these rarefied levels of society, you don't say "Eton and Cambridge", but "Eton and King's", indicating the college you attended and assuming that people know which colleges are at which university (there are seven names that are used by colleges at both, so you'd say "Trinity Oxford" and write "Trinity, Oxon.")
“…the stewardess…”
Flight attendant, you insensitive clod!
We should have just started calling all of them stewards, regardless of sex.
I think the switch to "flight attendant" needs to be looked at not just as moving to non-gendered language but also the rise of inflated sounding titles (e.g., "sanitation engineer") that I believe was going on at the same time.
I think the rise of non-gendered work category terms has been a very welcome development: police officer, firefighter, chair (or even chairperson), and so on. Nothing wrong with "flight attendant." Is it inflated sounding or just the term for the person who attends your needs during a flight?
And does anyone actually use the term "sanitation engineer"?
I didn't say the switch wasn't a welcome development, I just was observing that the reason why there was a move towards an entirely new term rather than just "universalizing" the traditionally male term (which was done with some other words, e.g., "aviator" versus "aviatrix") seems related to a trend that happened with many job titles from the late 1960s to 1980s that went beyond just eliminating gendered terminology. I don't know if anyone actually uses "sanitation engineer" (I referenced it because it's probably the most widely derided example) but I absolutely get rung up by a "sales assistant" or "sales associate" at the store, not a "clerk" or "cashier."
Yes, that's a very good point too. I first picked up on this as a kid watching the second Tim Burton Batman movie, when Selina Kyle was being persnickety of wanting to be called an executive assistant instead of a secretary.
Paul Westerberg contended that despite this title inflation, they were still just "waitresses in the sky": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHkgsYLs0DQ
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.
https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/01/25
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
I agree completely except I would amend one word here. It’s not an “intellectually dominant class” but a “materially dominant class”. They wear those terms like they wear the latest fashion. Doesn’t make them intellectuals anymore more than fashion designers (and in both cases - it seems to me - they tend to prefer the showy and noisy to that which shows good sense and good taste)
Are you sure? Are the Waltons woke? Is Bezos? Musk? How about oil company executives? Further down the hierarchy, provincial one percenters are rarely woke: they include country urologists, owners of auto dealerships and chains of fast food restaurants.
I think your idea of the materially dominant class might suffer from urban provincialism. Yes, the rich people and one percenters in NY, SF and even Chicago skew woke, but that’s only a smallish minority of the American upper class.
Bezos is woke and generally all CEOs save Musk are woke.
https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/jeff-bezos-lose-customers-black-lives-matter-george-floyd
Perhaps oil companies are holdouts but I live in a poor flyover state and even local rich people are generally woke. 100% of high earning professionals are left wing and a large percentage of business owners as well. For example, most doctors graduating today are women and educated white women are statistically the most left wing group in our society. The reason is that you will lose your job in any large corporation for not being woke enough.
The only people who can still be right-wing and economically successful are the owners of blue collar businesses like plumbing and HVAC.
Idk. I wouldn’t be surprised if all their kids are quite woke and go to schools that preach wokeness. But maybe “cultural elite” is a better term. But with all due respect, very few journalists and politicians and close to no entertainment celebrities qualify as “intellectual” by any stretch.
Somebody wrote a book about why we might want to get mad about language change... oh yeah 1984 Newspeak. It is doubleplusungood to not worry about language change if the effect of the language change is to better limit or provoke speech to achieve a goal you disagree with.
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...
Which is why the rise in admin connects with rise in dei and fall of the sat. Because after ww2 we used to believe in trying to get the most talented and hard working of whatever background and consciously trying to dismantle class as a criterion for acceptance into elite institutions. Now it’s all regressive dramatically and people don’t fully realize it.
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.
Not long ago I had a medical procedure done when I was visiting home (Boston, MA). This was a big teaching hospital within city limits. The receptionist who signed me in — a stout, working class woman in, I'd say, her late 50s, greeted me (naturally a perfect stranger) with an extremely cheerful and utterly unselfconscious: "Hi daahlin howah you?"
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.
Is it metastasizing though? I'm still skeptical about how much staying power a lot of wokeness lingo has. Most people who subscribe to Matt's blog probably know what BIPOC means, or have become aware that "enslaved person" is now often preferred over "slave" — and so on. But what's the percentage of the general population? Some of it will stick, for sure (at one point "Ms" was used solely by the woke of that era). But not all of it will. My sense (to cite one example) is that "Black" has made a nice comeback (upper case, to be sure) ands "African-America" — which seemed very strongly preferred only ten years ago, is in retreat. I'm skeptical "queer" will really replace "gay" — although I guess we'll find out at some point.
I figure the English language has a way of taking care of itself. That which isn't useful—which doesn't fill a niche that needed filling—tends to fade away despite the best efforts of influential people. "Groovy" and "gnarly" mercifully went away, because we already had "cool."
Agreed. Language development is actually one of our most democratic institutions. Elites can propose and try to mandate linguistic changes but if they're not picked up by a broader public, they die.
Yeah I had written another paragraph that I cut out for the sake of pithiness...the upshot was: I acknowledge language evolves, and yes, you’re spitting into the wind by trying to stop it. But this flavor of change isn’t just a benign curiosity, it’s being weaponized.
If you say ‘stewardess’ instead of ‘flight attendant’ - or hell, if you use the word ‘programmer’ instead of ‘engineer’ at work, you’ll get some OK Boomer eye rolls...but there are phrases and words that were totally acceptable 10 minutes ago that will suddenly (more or less) put you on the wrong end of an HR meeting, with all that implies. I’ve said things that have prompted my 6th grader to say ‘dad if you use that word it means you’re a racist’ - not ‘you shouldn’t say that’ or ‘there’s a new word we use’ or ‘Ok Boomer’ but ‘you are a racist. Full stop.’ because that’s what she’s constantly hearing at school.
Now draw a straight line from that into the future when we have a cohort of young adults who have been brought up being told that a person’s intent, the quality of their soul, their worth to society, their right to live and work...can be weighed by hearing them speak one word, context, intention, background be damned. It gives me serious concern.
Now get off my lawn!
Someone apparently hasn’t been attending the right Paris salons every week for the past two centuries.
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.
I think its lip service more than anything else. Much easier (and cheaper) to talk about DEI than lower tuition across the board to make these schools more accessible.
This is a poor argument.
I’m not cheapening my kids education, sorry. Providing great education is expensive.
Its not my fault society values education far less than I do. In fact, I pour a ton of resources into education over and beyond what my kids use and still people complain to me about how my advocacy is wrong. Welp, lets see you all shovel a ton of resources and countless volunteer hours into k-12 education. I try to spread my philanthropy around for sure but of course I’m going to enable my kids success and contentment as best as I know how.
What’s a great education? Imo if you’re abandoning academic rigor (advanced math, serious books , opening students horizons to other cultures periods ideas and *provincialising* the here and now, encouraging free and an uninhibited vigorous debate, etc) in favor of a monoculture of political indoctrination and fear and presentist naval gazing privileging one lens only through which to analyze only contemporary American society then respectfully are you really providing a good education?
(To be clear - I’m using the general you here. Don’t know your views far less any school you are associated with!)
I have abandoned what?
What is your data on that sir? You seem to have made wild assumptions.
I could lead an argument with "IMO if you're a baby eating pedophile..." too. To be clear, my values and my kids school support inclusiveness of ideas and academic rigor and none of the bullshit stereotypical nonsense you've advanced here. THanks
Quality education is expensive to provide because it necessarily requires providing resources and paying teachers salaries. Things I'm willing to spend far more on than the average.
I have made no personal assumptions as I actually bothered to explicitly clarify. I do however see and read how in *some cases* eg dei ideolgy justifies the elimination of advanced placement classes and the teaching of calculus , the narrowing down and dumbing down of literature classes , the inability of students and teachers to enrage in free and open debates on too many subjects and a divisive harmful atmosphere that encourages students to prioritize their American-census-defined racial identity over any other aspect of their personality and interests. Again, not necessarily in our case but in enough cases. All done in the name of, and often via the actual mechanisms of dei (eg by dei bureaucrats, )
Its frustrating when clearly misguided, stereotypical and clearly false assumptions are made against work and advocacy one passionately pursues.
I assure you I've seen zero evidence of any dumbing down of curriculum to serve these interests or anything else. I've seen my kids school thrive and them be really effective, decent, smart kids who are every bit if not more capable on core subject matter as I was at the same age and those around them that attend public schools. They're also receiving an excellent moral education, one that I've opted into and specifically embrace. That morality is explicitly pluralistic, open and truth seeking, as core features.
Private education costs more because of student teacher ratio, the more modern and better facilities and technology, more opportunity for travel and visiting local institutions.
I insisted that lowering tuition of private schools to encourage integration is definitely NOT the answer to our education problems. WE need a lot MORE funding, which I provide and advocate for, both for my kids school and for public schools.
Meanwhile our Philly public schools are often legit dangerous, often due to poor ventilation, a facility problem COVID magnified badly. I advocate and materially support the Education Law Center, which seeks to use legal action to force the state to more adequately fund Philly public schools.
I also advocate and help to fund a wonderful little nonprofit called Reading Allowed, a nonprofit tutoring service (one that spun out of our private progressive school) for kids with learning disabilities. This program relies on intensive tutoring for overcoming language learning disabilities, which is something even our expensive private school cannot provide due to its massive expense. It provides the service using a sliding scale based on financial need and subsidized by the generosity of supporters to offer this to families that cannot afford it. Research shows an absurd portion of violent offenders suffered learning disabilities and never learned to properly read, and fell through cracks because of this.
I also materially support this Philly charter school: https://www.boyslatin.org/
I have also volunteered in the Big Brother Big Sister mentor ship program as a means to promote racial harmony and gain specific exposure and help to serve to undeserved black communities (though regrettably over COVID my relationship dwindled)
So the pushback I receive here, especially when I mentioned some such advocacy on MLK day, is really stinking aggravating, especially when I'm told I'm not earnest or that I'm doing it wrong. You want to do it - go for it.
To be fair, these institutions also have generous financial aid for a small number of students from low income backgrounds. They don’t *only* do the cheap things.
Private k-12 education is pretty fundamentally an excellent place to push for cultural change. Involvement is voluntary and funding is private. Kids are young and impressionable (and our own). And my experience is this set will be meaningfully empowered by their education and network.
Yes, many of us are very much earnest and passionate about equal access as both a moral and long-term performance/effectiveness issue.
Can you explain point no 1?
People work in private schools for many reasons. Maybe they worked in the public sector and got burned out. Maybe they transitioned from academia or a different career and wanted to teach but didn't have a teaching credential. Maybe they like the curricular and pedagogical independence of a private school. Or maybe they are good teachers but just don't have the skill-set or disposition to work in public schools. But you don't really see people go work in private schools because they want to perpetuate the existing social order. To Ed's good point above, folks want to feel that they are making a difference. So it's hard to recruit and retain a talented faculty without signaling commitment not just to include a more diverse student body but to make efforts to create a welcoming space. While it's common to see some authors (Matt included, to an extent) punch down at private school teachers, they are earnest, well-meaning people and their desires also push institutions to try and be more inclusive. The awkwardness of many DEI initiatives and the focus on language and race (there are no "low-income" or class-based affinity groups) is in part a reflection of the contradiction between the desire to be more inclusive with the imperatives of a tuition-charging institution where the majority of the community is high-income.
I guess I just feel the whole ideology is so sick I can’t relate. But i can see why many people growing up in America would see it differently. Personally I see no reason why it couldn’t be class based. Not via a crude mechanism like “affinity groups” (cringe) but simply by touting the generosity of financial aid and the school as a social mobility tool for bright middle and working class peole. That was the “progressive” ethos of private schools of old I believe. That- and trying to mold the elite generally to be better people. My problem is that it seems to me that now these schools subscribe to an ethos that is utter poison. But I get that this is a subjective assessment.
You bring up an interesting point. It used to be more common for private schools to have community service requirements, And while there was a noblesse de oblige vibe to some of these efforts they at least represented a genuine effort at public engagement. Ironically, a lot of current DEI work by focusing so much on internal attitudes and thought processes and by shying away from more explicit discussions of class have led to an abandonment of community-engagement efforts. And many liberal authors (again, Matt included) have fed into this by ridiculing actors in the private space for having progressive values. So it's damned if you do, damned if you don't. Not sure what ideology you are referring to or what exactly is sick. I don't find that language helpful. It's less ideology than a series of conflicting beliefs born, for the most part, of genuine good will. I think private schools do tout their financial aid budgets and do tout themselves as spaces for upward mobility. And they have to be careful to do so in a way that does not sound paternalistic or condescending. And, yes, Americans are by and large not good at class-based analysis.
I would suggest that if you believe in raising the next ruling-upper-class that is mostly wealth based : which is what you certainly de facto believe in if you support a private fancy prep school! Then the lesser evil under this inegalitarian model is noblesse oblige. If we must have rich elites (which I’m not sure about being personally a social democrat!) I’d much rather they be the old school noblesse oblige type and take public duty seriously
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?
Yeah, the entire argument boils down to "elite groups use language and customs to distinguish themselves from non-elites." Which... yes? In groups have done this to out groups since the dawn of language, and possibly before! Ask any red state conservative and one of the first things they'll complain about with liberals is the fancy language.
The argument I *thought* Matt was going to make was "elite institutions use language to obscure the fact that they're doing very little to effect real change in combating inequality." Does a place like Dalton really want to commit to charging lower tuition to advance educational opportunities for all NYC kids? Ha ha no. Alas... maybe for another comment section.
>>>“Yeah, the entire argument boils down to "elite groups use language and customs to distinguish themselves from non-elites." Which... yes? In groups have done this to out groups since the dawn of language, and possibly before“
I largely agree with this, but at least the English schools had the decency to acknowledge that this was what they were doing, instead of hiding it under several layers of incredibly tedious and ever-changing obscurantism under the guise of inclusivity while charging $60,000 / year.
One thing you can say for a bias for tradition instead of progressivism as a matter of elite signalling is that at least it’s likely a bit less subject to the euphemism treadmill.
“…at least the English schools had the decency to acknowledge that this was what they were doing…”
In 2007 a new housing development began construction where I used to live in New Jersey. [I had a recent conversation with someone here about NIMBYism in that town.] It began with the clearing of a 1.5 square mile wooded area, excavating for underground utilities, laying out a street grid, and the building of a model house near the main road to serve as a sales office. There was a tasteful sign made of brick, limestone, and bronze near the sales office with the pretentiously upscale yet bucolic name of the development. The typical house in the town was on a 1/8 - 1/4 acre plot; these new “estate” homes were on 2+ acres and were 5,000+ square feet, depending on the model. Prices started at $950K before upgrades.
I checked out the developer’s website, which was appropriately slick (by 2007 standards) and included detailed floor plans for each model. Some of the models included a bedroom with direct access to one of the garages, and were labeled “Nanny’s Room.” For some reason it came up in conversation at work and I showed the website to a couple of my colleagues. One of them was British and he commented, “In England that room would be called the “Servant’s Quarters,” but you Americans pretend not to go for that sort of thing.
Yeah, I wasn't quite sure what the point (or argument?) was, either...just a discourse on his thoughts on this topic with no particular take-away? But it was interesting. And at bare minimum Matt's pieces set off spirited discussions! You can't beat it for a buck-fifty week.
But Dalton will probably argue that it provides lots of financial aid to increase representation.
They would argue that, but is that doing much to significantly dent inequality? Generously, let's say that's 50 students per year (it's probably less), versus about a million students in the NYC public school system. Even granting that a large chunk of those public school students are hardly poor, probably 99.9% of then aren't Dalton-rich.
Dalton and private schools can't be expected to solve the problems of public mismanagement.
Of course not, but it's disingenuous for them to pretend that they are or that the status quo doesn't suit them perfectly well.