McWhorter: ‘The Zorg’ tells a story we all must hear

2025/11/14 Leave a comment

Another good column, again a reminder that simplistic Manichean dichotomies don’t reflect historical realities and complexities:

…As the African American studies professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. has written and I have experienced, people are often uncomfortable learning that Africans sold one another into this living hell. A common objection is that Africans had no way of knowing what conditions their captives would encounter. But they saw those captives being marched all but to death, sold like animals and penned into a slave castle hold. Black African slave traders had more than enough information to understand the fundamental immorality of the undertaking. If whites had seen even only what the Africans saw, we would not hesitate to judge them as unforgivably complicit in sin.

One lesson of “The Zorg” is that history and people are complex. The recently fashionable view of American (or Western) history as just one extended hit job, with whiteness always the oppressor and people of color always the subaltern, is ultimately a childish temptation, excusing us from engaging detail and nuance. Humans of all shades have quite often been awful to one another. Our job is to work against that tendency, not to pretend it doesn’t exist. And to celebrate those who overcome it, whatever their race. Abolitionism — a Western, Anglophone achievement, which Kara recounts in a final chapter — was a keystone example of that effort, and “The Zorg” is invaluable instruction in what made it so important….

Source: ‘The Zorg’ tells a story we all must hear

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McWhorter: Those flubs of Mamdani’s name aren’t necessarily what they sound like

2025/10/31 1 Comment

Always interesting:

…I once heard two colleagues grumbling about the ways that people mispronounced their names. One of those colleagues was Italian; the other was a Black Muslim. They took it as an unquestionable sign of disrespect. I thought they could have eased up a little, given that they themselves surely had occasion to screw up unfamiliar names. It’s quite difficult not to.

If Mamdani is elected mayor, mispronunciations of his name will diminish, and soon sound very dated. Repetition and practice will assure that his name gets more respect than Kosciuszko’s. But in the here and now, it’s worth not leaping to conclusions about why someone might jumble the sounds. Between the human mouth, the power of habit and the vagaries of spelling, “Zor-han Mandami” is an inevitable first step toward, as Mamdani put it, getting it right.

Source: Those flubs of Mamdani’s name aren’t necessarily what they sound like

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McWhorter: A Term So Outdated, Even President Trump Wouldn’t Use It

2025/07/28 Leave a comment

Good take:

On Sunday, President Trump, still on the ropes because of the controversy over the government’s Jeffrey Epstein files, ventured a distraction. With all the usual exclamation points and eccentric capitalization, he sounded the alarm on an issue a reader might have mistaken for a national crisis: the names of professional sports franchises. In particular those franchises that had cast off names that no longer felt culturally appropriate: the Washington Commanders, formerly the Redskins, and the Cleveland Guardians, formerly the Indians.

“The Washington ‘Whatever’s’ should IMMEDIATELY change their name back to the Washington Redskins Football Team. There is a big clamoring for this. Likewise, the Cleveland Indians, one of the six original baseball teams,” — by the way, it wasn’t — “with a storied past. Our great Indian people, in massive numbers, want this to happen. Their heritage and prestige is systematically being taken away from them.”

With typical subtlety, Trump concluded, “OWNERS, GET IT DONE!!!”

The controversy dates back more than a half-century. It was formalized in 1968, when the National Congress of American Indians embarked on a campaign to fight negative stereotypes of native people in American culture.

For a while, however, the evidence on the word “redskin” seemed equivocal. Polls by the Annenberg Public Policy Center, in 2004, and again by The Washington Post, in 2016, reported that a vast majority of actual Native Americans had no problem with the term. Was the whole thing just a politically correct tempest in a teapot, an effort to fix something that wasn’t actually a problem?

In 2020, a new poll was conducted. This one asked respondents for more finely grained responses and gave them more opportunity to consider their answers. The outcome was very different: Almost half of 1,000 Native Americans surveyed indeed found the term “redskin” to be offensive. Organized college athletics had long since forsworn team mascots that were based on caricatures of Indians. Amid the national climate of racial reckoning that George Floyd’s death and the Black Lives Matter movement brought on, the Washington football franchise announced it would change its name.

When Trump claims that “our great Indian people, in massive numbers, want this to happen,” there is no reason to wonder if he commissioned his own secret polling. But you don’t need a poll to understand why he’s wrong.

I doubt even Trump himself would be comfortable using that contested term to address a human being. Imagine him inviting a tribal leader to join him at some White House ceremony and introducing him as “my honored guest, a respected redskin.” At best, the term sounds like an artifact from some century-old stage play. To most ears, it simply sounds like a slur.

My grandmother was a laundress for a very wealthy white family, who would grant their staff a lovely week at their Maine island getaway every summer. Grandmom took us there with her for two summers in the mid-1970s. The white staff members there, while at least outwardly kind to my Black family, were acridly unfond of the local Native Americans. I had occasion to hear them late at night hissing about “those redskins.” That’s what we want as the name of a football team?

But even those who agree with me on that point might still quite reasonably ask what was wrong with “Cleveland Indians.” The term “Native American” may sound more respectful, but a vast majority of people who trace their ancestry to America’s tribal nations prefer being called Indians.

That might seem odd, given that “Indian” was a term imposed on them by Christopher Columbus when he mistakenly thought he had reached India. But it’s not that unusual.

As I wrote recently, quite a few Black Americans prefer “Black” over “African American,” despite the fact that “Black” was a term imposed on people with dark skin by people with light skin, and it sure wasn’t meant as a compliment. At the turn of the previous century, even educated Black people such as Sylvester Russell, an editorialist at the Indianapolis newspaper The Freeman, reportedly approved of the usage of “darkey.” In 1908 the doughty Black opera diva Sissieretta Jones asked, “Is there a soul so insensible that it cannot be stirred to the very depths by the heartbroken cry of the poor old homesick darkey?”

The problem with the Cleveland Indians isn’t “Indian.” The Cleveland Native Americans would be just as wrong. The problem isn’t the word choice; it’s the choice to use a human group as a mascot at all. Even if the members of that group are celebrated as brave warriors. No one today would be debating the merits of a team called the Boston Blacks or the New Jersey Negroes. How about the New York Jews or the Pittsburgh Polacks? Shifting to a more seemly Pittsburgh Poles would do nothing to solve the glaringly obvious problem. People are not pets.

Trump is right that the heritage and prestige of American Indians have been “systematically taken away from them,” but that is the work of the United States government, which pursued an explicit policy of dehumanization and dispossession and achieved it with horrifying success. Going back to antique stereotypes only continues the process.

Source: A Term So Outdated, Even President Trump Wouldn’t Use It

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McWhorter: Listen Up. Ketanji Brown Jackson Is Speaking to You.

2025/07/19 Leave a comment

Nice post on the use of language. Plain language vs legalese:

When Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote her ringing dissent in the case of Trump v. CASA, which severely curtailed the ability of lower courts to serve as a check on unlawful executive orders, she wanted to make abundantly clear the danger of what she regarded as a “seismic shock” to American legal norms. “Courts must have the power to order everyone (including the executive) to follow the law — full stop,” she wrote. She continued, in a voice dripping with sarcasm, “The majority sees a power grab — but not by a presumably lawless executive choosing to act in a manner that flouts the plain text of the Constitution. Instead, to the majority, the power-hungry actors are … (wait for it) … the district courts.”

Social media platforms exploded with outrage.

One user asked, in apparent disbelief, “Did Ketanji Brown Jackson actually pop that stupid little ‘wait for it’ gag in a SCOTUS opinion?” Another said the dissent “single-handedly degraded 235 years, four months, and 25 days of SCOTUS precedent.” The worst of them turned the justice’s language back on her as a weapon. “Ketanji Brown Jackson is … (wait for it) …” — well, I won’t repeat the insult here, but for good measure, commenter added, “full stop.”

Her critics were right to note that Justice Jackson was doing something unusual. And it wasn’t just those examples. She peppered the whole dissent with expressions like “Why all the fuss?” “Do not take my word for it,” “Here is what I mean,” and the assessment — again with unmistakable sarcasm — “That is some solicitation.”

You won’t find anything like that in Marbury v. Madison.

What’s striking about Justice Jackson’s turns of phrase is that they employ what we typically regard as oral language — spontaneous, spoken words — in an extremely serious written text. That choice and the blowback it encountered are a chance to consider the arbitrariness and narrowness of the conventions dictating how legal opinions should be written. The expectation that their language be timeless, faceless and Latinate is a matter of custom, not necessity. “Why all the fuss?” indeed.

Justice Jackson is, at 54, the second-youngest justice on the court. She was raised in the 1980s, a time when America’s writing culture was getting markedly less hidebound. Waving aside the hats and girdles and stuffy dance steps of old, the counterculture had shown America how to let its language hang out, too. A new, looser style of writing allowed a play between the oral and the written, and the result enriched the culture rather than impoverishing it.

I can’t speak for Justice Jackson, but that shift had a big impact on a great many people who grew up in that era’s wake. It definitely had a big impact on me. I write in what I hope is a conversational style. Like Justice Jackson, I have sometimes been scolded for it by people who would prefer that I write “with a tie on,” as it were.

Justice Jackson isn’t the only writer to experiment with mixing orality into rarefied texts. Saul Bellow reveled in the highflying lexicographic richness of the English language, but then every so often paused for a fillip of the colloquial. In “Seize the Day,” he describes a character in language so precise and vivid that it verges on poetry: “And in the dark tunnel, in the haste, heat, and darkness which disfigure and make freaks and fragments of nose and eyes and teeth, all of a sudden, unsought, a general love for all these imperfect and lurid-looking people burst out in Wilhelm’s breast. He loved them. One and all, he passionately loved them.” Just a bit later, Bellow renders the character’s thoughts, and he does so in the baggier structure of speech: “That’s the right clue and may do me the most good. Something very big. Truth, like.”

Key is the “Truth, like,” approximate and slangy, the way that the character would really talk and think. In its immediacy and urgency, oral language pulls us in, makes us listen once we have sat still. Weaving it together with a more formal written style is Bellovian jazz.

Back to Justice Jackson. Behind all the harrumphing is an assumption that language that is accessible cannot also be precise. But Justice Jackson’s own words show that this assumption is mistaken. “It is odd, to say the least,” she wrote, “that the court would grant the executive’s wish to be freed from the constraints of law by prohibiting district courts from ordering complete compliance with the Constitution. But the majority goes there.” The second-sentence shift to spoken language conveys fervor, urgency and concern, but it doesn’t lessen the scalpel-like precision of the first sentence. And its “Oh-no-you-didn’t!” informality heightens the sense that this is not a remote matter of merely academic interest.

And, as always, orality grabs your attention. Think about how much less powerful her point would be if she stuck to more traditional, formal language such as “the majority ventures this regardless.”

The evolution of language always encounters resistance, and sometimes outrage. When the word “ain’t” appeared in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary in 1961, purists freaked out — and The Times demanded its removal. That response didn’t age well, and neither does the hue and cry over Justice Jackson’s impassioned attempts to convey a sense of urgency. Call it Jacksonian jazz, if you like. But calling it stupid is just nastiness — full stop.

Source: Listen Up. Ketanji Brown Jackson Is Speaking to You.

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McWhorter: It’s Time to Let Go of ‘African American’

2025/07/15 Leave a comment

Makes sense given recent immigration from Africa in contrast to descendents of the slave trade:

I’m no fan of performative identity politics, and I think racial preferences are long past their expiration date. Yet I don’t think the New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani did anything wrong when, as was reported last week, he checked off “Black or African American” on a college application. As a man of South Asian descent who spent the first part of his life living in Uganda, he was within his rights to call himself African American. The problem is that the term appeared on the application, or anywhere else. Plenty of Black people have never liked it, and ever more are joining the ranks. It’s time to let it go.

“African American” entered mainstream circulation in the late ’80s as a way to call attention to Black people’s heritage in the same way that terms like “Italian American” and “Asian American” do for members of those groups. The Rev. Jesse Jackson encouraged its usage, declaring: “Black does not describe our situation. In my household there are seven people and none of us have the same complexion. We are of African American heritage.” In 1989 the columnist and historian Roger Wilkins told Isabel Wilkerson: “Whenever I go to Africa, I feel like a person with a legitimate place to stand on this earth. This is the name for all the feelings I’ve had all these years.”

Since that time, the United States has seen an enormous change in immigration patterns. In 1980 there were about 200,000 people in America who were born in Africa; by 2023 there were 2.8 million. So today, for people who were born in Africa, any children they have after moving here and Black people whose last African ancestors lived centuries ago, the term “African American” treats them as if they are all in the same category, forcing a single designation for an inconveniently disparate range of humans.

Further complicating matters is that many Africans now living here are not Black. White people from, for example, South Africa or Tanzania might also legitimately call themselves African American. As for the community that Mamdani grew up in, it dates back to at least the late 19th century, when South Asians were brought to Uganda to work as servants for British colonizers. “Mississippi Masala,” the movie for which Mamdani’s mother, the filmmaker Mira Nair, is perhaps best known, tells the story of South Asian Ugandans expelled from the country in 1972 by the dictator Idi Amin. Feeling just as dislocated from the only home they had ever known as I would feel if expelled from the United States, they would be quite reasonable in viewing themselves as African Americans after settling here.

A term that is meant to be descriptive but that can refer to Cedric the Entertainer, Trevor Noah, Elon Musk and Zohran Mamdani is a little silly.

And not just silly but chilly. “African American” sounds like something on a form. Or something vaguely euphemistic, as if you’re trying to avoid saying something out loud. It feels less like a term for the vibrant, nuanced bustle of being a human than like seven chalky syllables bureaucratically impervious to abbreviation. Italian Americans call themselves “Italian” for short. Asian Americans are “Asian.” But for any number of reasons, it’s hard to imagine a great many Black Americans opting to call themselves simply African.

To the extent that “African American” was designed to change perceptions of what “Black” means, it hasn’t worked. The grand old euphemism treadmill has done it in. Again and again we create new terms hoping to get past negative associations with the old ones, such as “homeless” for “bum.” But after a while the negative associations settle like a cloud of gnats on the new terms as well, and then it’s time to find a further euphemism. With no hesitation I predict that “unhoused person” will need replacement in about 2030.

At an earlier point in its life cycle, “African American” could at least be argued to have an air of pride and lineage, free of any historical association with inferiority. Back in the day you could imagine it sung to the same melody as Alexander Hamilton’s name is in the opening song to the musical about him: “A-le-XANder HA-mil-ton”; “A-fri-CAN a-MER-i-can.” But these days “African American” and “Black” strike the same note.

In 2020, when a Black man in Central Park asked a white woman to leash her dog, she dialed 911, warning him, “I’m going to tell them there’s an African American man threatening my life.” There was nothing euphemistic in the way she used that term.

But all along we’ve had a perfectly good word to describe Black people: Black. We should just use that.

Black power! Yeah. But African American power? Do we imagine Lorraine Hansberry and Nina Simone explaining how it feels to be “Young, Gifted and African American”? And would we want to?

Let Mamdani and other people — of all shades — born in Africa or about a generation past it call themselves African Americans. But here, over centuries, descendants of African slaves have become something else — and proudly, I hope. In American parlance, we are Black. And proud. And (you knew it was coming) say it loud.

“Black is beautiful.” Yes. Truly, “African American” isn’t.

Source: It’s Time to Let Go of ‘African American’

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McWhorter: Viewed From Any Angle, This Station Is a Wonder and an Inspiration

2025/06/14 Leave a comment

Money quote: “That feeling of hunger to see, to know, that sense of awe and joy — that is what education should foster.”

…Which is why it depresses me endlessly when these goals narrow in the way they so often do today. So many teachers or professors seem to think that during the short time we have students under our influence, our primary job is to instruct them in how to illuminate injustice.

The field of education, for example, is a rich subject — “How many miles to the heart of a child?” asked the lead character in Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson’s 1949 musical “Lost in the Stars.” But in “What’s College For?” the author Zachary Karabell describes something sadly familiar these days: a professor focused on telling students how America’s educational apparatus perpetuates class stratification.

The film critic David Denby, in “Great Books,” his volume about Columbia University’s core curriculum, described an instructor whose only apparent interest in Aristotle was in condemning his sexism and racism, rather than exploring the broader scope of his writings. I once sat in on a course about Black film in which the main theme class after class was how each movie exemplified negative stereotypes. The artistry, the richness, the reasons the films were meaningful to Black people were considered of lesser interest. Rachmaninoff’s piano concertos, every word of George Eliot’s “Middlemarch,” William Levi Dawson’s “Negro Symphony” from start to finish — all of these can be laboriously interpreted as demonstrations of the abuse of power. But doing so misses their true value.

I would hate to see anyone put that kind of teaching to use when entering Michigan Central Station — to internalize the idea that upon encountering that magnificence, one’s thoughts should be primarily about injustice. Certainly the Black porters there worked under less than ideal conditions; white passengers often saw them as barely human. (The convention back in the day was to call all Black porters “George,” because who cared what they called themselves?) It’s important to remember these facts. But even amid that bigotry, Black people had the same capacity as white people to see beauty. And they have the same capacity today.

On the way to Michigan Central, I was talking with a Black guy named Anton who had grown up nearby. As the building came into view, rising so majestically into the day’s overcast sky and set diagonally to the main road, I shouted, “Goddamn!” At the very same second, Anton exclaimed “Look at that! There it is, man!”

That feeling of hunger to see, to know, that sense of awe and joy — that is what education should foster.

Source: Viewed From Any Angle, This Station Is a Wonder and an Inspiration

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McWhorter: The Future of Black History Lives on Donald Trump’s Front Lawn

2025/05/22 Leave a comment

Good commentary:

…The proper response to that very real problem, however, is, as President Bill Clinton put it about affirmative action, to “mend it, but don’t end it.”

Mr. Trump’s approach is instead a bleat of tribalist pique, seeking to simply deep-six any discussion of race (or gender or sexuality, or a great many other uncomfortable topics). His executive order “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity” is a clapback to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that frames any outreach efforts to Black people as by definition a form of discrimination against white people.

A mature, multiethnic society should resist the complacency of birds-of-a-feather hirings and admissions, instead seeking out talent wherever it might reside and whatever it might look like. To be sure, that mission was sullied by identity politics, the temptations of virtue signaling, the opportunity to follow the funding trail and ultimately a tacit commitment to lowering standards. Mend that. Don’t try to force the country back to an earlier, more willfully oblivious era, when the topic of inequality was everywhere to be witnessed but nowhere to be mentioned. That is a kind of barbarity.

So is the idea is that any teachings about Black history are a form of political agitation, “radical and wasteful,” as another executive order on D.E.I. has it. That our country openly addresses Black history in all of its facets is a badge of honor and sophistication, and the institution that Mr. Trump called out as harming our view of American history is an exemplar of all the field could be. The president and his minions should just walk on by. The rest of us should walk on in.

Source: The Future of Black History Lives on Donald Trump’s Front Lawn

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McWhorter: An Unkind Policy for a Nonexistent Problem [English as official language]

2025/03/07 Leave a comment

More good commentary by McWhorter:

“You come here, you speak our language!”

That is the elevator-pitch version of one of President Trump’s latest executive orders.

In form, it undoes the requirement, instituted under the Clinton administration, that government agencies and organizations offer services and documents in various languages.

In spirit, it does much more — and much worse.

The “English only” idea goes way back. Benjamin Franklin worried about there being too much German spoken in our country. Theodore Roosevelt was on board as well, proclaiming in 1919, “We have room for but one language in this country, and that is the English language, for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans, of American nationality, and not as dwellers in a polyglot boarding house.” The organization U.S. English, founded by Senator S.I. Hayakawa and the anti-immigration activist John Tanton in the 1980s, has been especially persistent. The group argues that elevating English to official status gives us a common means of communication, encourages immigrants to assimilate and “defines a much-needed common-sense language policy.”

This is nonsense, because we already have a common means of communication: English.

Other languages are spoken in America as well, some even passed down through generations. But Americans use English as their lingua franca regardless of whatever else they speak.

In 19th-century Italy, it was a different story. Piedmontese to the north and Sicilian to the south had so little in common with Tuscan in the middle that they qualified as different languages altogether. What Italians had was what the Strother Martin character in the film “Cool Hand Luke” famously called a failure to communicate. So when the regions were unified into a single nation, elevating one dialect — Tuscan — above the others was necessary.

Not here. For one thing, it is unclear just where in this country Trump thinks people are being raised without the ability to communicate in English. All I can think of is Haredi Jewish communities, where life is conducted in Yiddish and some children do not really learn to speak English. But something tells me they are not the ones on Trump’s mind.

Then there’s the claim that this order will compel immigrants to learn English, and the implication that people who fail to do so are shirking a basic American duty. This attitude is based on ignorance about how people acquire language.

In our midteens — after the end of what linguists call the critical period — our ability to master a new language starts to atrophy. I once lived next door to a couple that had just arrived from Israel. Their 2-year-old knew no English at all and used to squeak “khatul!” whenever he saw the cute black cat I had back then. A few years later he sounded like Macaulay Culkin. That’s how it is for little kids. Those who start living in English at, say, 16 will learn to speak fluently but probably retain a slight accent, and when tired might flub the occasional idiom. Adults starting from zero encounter almost inevitable limits. A brilliant Slav I know came to North America at about 50. His English was great, but with a strong accent and a tendency now and then to render things the way his native language would, such as designating me “an early-waking-up person.” This was normal.

Learning a new language, after all, isn’t just a matter of dutifully memorizing the words for things; you also have to learn how to put them together. Example: A native Spanish speaker is learning English. She’s at an American club and wants to say, “The guy who brought me can’t dance!” (Quick, show music geeks, what’s that from?) First she has to know that the past tense of “bring” is not “bringed” but the hopelessly random “brought,” and that in English we put the direct object (“me”) after rather than before the verb. Or, the woman is a native English speaker at a club in Beijing, new to Mandarin but trying to say the same thing. In Mandarin she’d have to say, “The take-me-come-in-guy can’t dance.”

That’s all part of why immigrants in late middle age or beyond, if they live in communities where almost everyone speaks their native language, may never really find their footing in English. In my neighborhood, where I am frequently assumed to be Dominican, barbers address me in Spanish and older Latinos, especially women, approach me asking me to point them in the right dirección. According to the English-only idea, those older ladies are a problem in some way. How?

Imagine a native Mandarin speaker who is new or newish to English. Let’s say she can get by just fine while navigating a menu or engaging in brief exchanges. Grand. But if she were being admitted to a hospital, taking a citizenship test, voting or doing anything else involving detail or urgency, she would want to be able to use, hear or read her native language. To deny her that is pointless and unfeeling.

But that is precisely what Trump’s executive order will do. In all those settings where ordinary people interact with government functions, nonnative speakers will be forced to muddle through in English alone, regardless of whether that produces any clarity for them — or for the government branch in question.

The only silver lining to all this is that to a considerable extent, modern technology will render the new rule powerless. Google Translate and other apps can now translate straight from the page, as well as interpret between you and another speaker in real time. The executive order “Designating English as the Official Language of the United States” will largely kneel to the power of the iPhone.

But what matters is the spirit of the thing. The English language is under not the slightest threat in America, and providing services in other languages for adults past the critical period is kindness, not disloyalty. A punitive yawp that English be “official” in this country is jingoistic trash talk in the guise of statesmanship.

By the way (alerting the Oxford English Dictionary as well as the upcoming Oxford Dictionary of African-American English!), we now have an even earlier example of the use of “woke” than the one my colleague Emily Berch unearthed two weeks ago. On Sept. 12, 1925, the Black journalist C.F. Richardson wrote, “Until we wake up, ‘stay woke’ (meaning to stay on the job at all times) and exert our full strength and power for our best interests, we shall forever be regarded, and treated as human slaves by the governing class and those in official positions.” Thanks to Fred Shapiro for this discovery (and check out his New Yale Book of Quotations).

Oh — and as for the origin of “The guy who brought me can’t dance!” the answer is the 1941 musical “Best Foot Forward,” with songs by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane and book by John Cecil Holm.

Source: An Unkind Policy for a Nonexistent Problem

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McWhorter: How Hollywood’s Awards Season Could Change the World (a Little)

2025/01/20 Leave a comment

Always interesting takes:

Hollywood’s awards shows are always closely scrutinized for signs of who’s up and who’s down, what’s in and what’s out. Lately they have also offered a clue about a trend that has nothing to do with film production or red carpet gowns. It’s about grammar. Amid all the razzle-dazzle, you may have missed the fact that last year the Golden Globes went where the Screen Actors Guild had previously led: They lauded not actors and actresses (lead, supporting or otherwise) but rather “female actors” and “male actors.”

After so many years and so many ceremonies, that was a real change for the industry, but it emerged from a long history. At least as far back as the 1980s, I’d heard calls to eliminate the use of female-marked terms such as “heroine,” “goddess,” “waitress” and “chairwoman” — and, yes, “actress.” (I for some reason have never truly internalized “flight attendant” over “stewardess,” and still have to remind myself to make the substitution.)

Such terms can seem to imply that the women who occupy these roles are somehow essentially different from — and perhaps lesser than — the men who do. Appending a female suffix positions the male version as the default, and makes the female word a mere version or variation of it.

The call to use “actor,” “hero,” “god” and “chair” to refer to women as well as men emerges from a belief that the words we use can shape our thoughts. That view was put forth most influentially by the linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf in the 1930s. The idea is that de-gendering our terms is a powerful gesture, a political act that asserts women’s equality and retrains our cultural assumptions.

A similar impulse has guided efforts to popularize inclusive language about race and gender identity or any number of other sensitive subjects. As those efforts proliferated in recent years, the consensus on what was inclusive and what was outdated seemed to shift faster and faster. It sometimes felt as if the lexical earth was shifting under our feet almost by the week — and not always for clear purpose.

Lately the tide seems to be turning against those attempts to engineer how people speak. In general, I’m glad about that. But de-gendering terms is a worthwhile endeavor that deserves an exemption from our impatience.

The problem with replacing older terms with newer, allegedly more sensitive ones is that a replacement term inevitably takes on the same negative associations that the old term had accreted. The psychologist Steven Pinker calls it the euphemism treadmill. Think of the procession from “crippled” to “handicapped” to “disabled” to “differently abled,” changes undertaken to avoid stigmatizing the people the term refers to. The constant renewal suggests that the effort has only had fitful success.

The introduction of a new term may suggest new ways of thinking, at least for some, and for a spell. But covering a hole in the roof with construction paper keeps the wind out, too, or at least some of it, and for a spell. It’s not actually a solution. The fashion of late to refer to the “unhoused” rather than the “homeless” is a useful example. “Homeless” began as a well-intended replacement of words like “bum” and “bag lady.” However, over time, the same dismissive associations those old terms engendered shifted over to “homeless person.” You can be sure that if “unhoused” becomes the default, it will need replacement in a generation or so. Truly addressing the homelessness (houselessness?) epidemic would be a much more meaningful approach to the problem than changing what we call it, and I suspect the “unhoused” would say the same.

De-gendering, however, is a different case. Unlike creating euphemisms, folding two words into one does not present a new model subject to obsolescence. “She’s an actor” simply phases out “actress” and sends it on its way, along with Studebakers, Koogle peanut butter and Red Skelton. It creates no new word poised to inherit the potentially dismissive air that “actress” implied.

Of course, changing words will hardly eliminate sexist bias. And I can’t help chuckling to recall one person I knew who years ago earnestly insisted on calling a Walkman a “Walkperson.” But to the extent that this kind of language change really can play some part in changing habits of mind, let’s form the new habit and pass it on to our kids.

Source: How Hollywood’s Awards Season Could Change the World (a Little)

Filed under gender, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

McWhorter: Ta-Nehisi Coates and the Myth of Black Fragility

2024/10/21 Leave a comment

Of note (McWhorter continues his contrarian views to mainstream discussion):

…That’s as it should be. Acting as though Black people can’t hold their own in a challenging discussion — as though they can’t speak up for themselves and therefore need others to speak up for them — isn’t antiracist, it’s demeaning. Blackness is not weakness. We need to stop coddling sane, self-sufficient Black people — like Coates — and move on.

Source: McWhorter: Ta-Nehisi Coates and the Myth of Black Fragility

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , , ,

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