On the "handicapped" thread, Trevor Morrison asks:
My mother spent years as an advocate for the disabled. On the basis of her work there, I'm reasonably certain that people actually involved in the lives of the disabled tend to favor "disabled" over "handicapped." Your defense of "handicapped" relies on your account of the word's etymology. So is your position that the formal definition and origin of a word always defines its appropriate usage, or do contemporary changes in usage affect things?
A good question, which I think deserves a detailed answer.
First, let me make clear that I don't think etymology dictates meaning; my post about "handicapped" was a rebuttal to the argument that "handicapped has a pejorative etymology, therefore it's a rude term to use"; that argument, I pointed out, was premised on an inaccurate factual claim. But one can still argue that the term is pejorative even if its original meaning is fairly innocent. Let me also make clear that I don't want to fault anyone for trying extra hard to accommodate what he sees as the preferences of a group or some members of that group; if that's your choice, fine by me.
Rather, it seems to me that the interesting question here is whether people have some sort of good manners obligation to abandon "disabled" for "handicapped," "American Indian" for "Native American," "black" for "African American," and so on. I think the answer is generally no, unless the old term is so commonly used as a pejorative that listeners can reasonably infer that your use of it is pejorative, or possibly if the old term is so rarely used and thus archaic that listeners can reasonably wonder "what does he mean by that?" when they hear it (e.g., "Negro" or "Hebrew" as a noun to refer to Jews). The mere fact that some members of a group, or even a majority of the members of a group, prefer the new term doesn't impose on us an obligation to use the new term. Here are a few reasons why.
1. To begin with, note that Prof. Morrison cites the views not of the disabled generally (a hard group to poll), but of "people actually involved in the lives of the disabled." More precisely, I suspect that he is relying on the views of those people who are "advocates of the disabled" and who are outspoken enough to express their views as to the preference. This may well be a highly unrepresentative sample of the disabled.
Just by way of example, a 1995 Labor Department survey reported that 50% of American Indians preferred "American Indian" and only 37% preferred "Native American"; 44% of blacks preferred "Black" and only 40% preferred "African-American" or "Afro-American"; 58% preferred "Hispanic" and only 12% preferred "Latino" (no separate data was given for "Latino/a"). Matters may have shifted some since 1995, but not vastly; and I'm pretty sure that in 1995, the preferred terms among activists were "Native American," "African-American," and (here I'm less sure) "Latino," yet the actual majority (or, for blacks, plurality) preferences were different. (Source: U.S. News & World Report, Nov. 20, 1995.) Even if I thought that I had some moral or good manners responsibility to use the label preferred by a strong majority of the group, I see no basis for accepting such a responsibility to use the label preferred by a vocal minority, or even half of the group.
2. Moreover, shifting from an old label to a new label is not cost-free. It's not cost-free for the speaker. Sometimes the new term has shades of meaning that aren't quite apt for certain uses, and thus requires extra work to think through. ("African-American," for instance, isn't a racial group, but a racial subset of Americans; it thus isn't always an apt substitute.) Sometimes the new term carries an ideological literal meaning that the spaker may disliks evoking, even when it's fairly clear that he's using the term just as a label and not for its literal meaning. This is clearest for "differently abled" or "Latter-Day Saint" (I have nothing against Mormons, but I prefer not to call them Saints, even with the implied quotes). But it may also apply in other situations, such as with "disabled"; some people may genuinely prefer to stress the handicap (i.e., burden) under which a person labors rather than his disability.
Sometimes the word acquires a connotation of adherence to the ideology that spawned it; the word "womyn" may be the most famous example, though I suspect that these days it's so often used facetiously that people may want to avoid it for that reason as well. Speakers may then resist using the term because they don't want to be seen as proclaiming allegiance to an ideology that they do not adhere to. Sometimes the new term is just clunkier and sounds more stilted to many people; some, I suspect, take this view as to African-American, and I suspect that headline writers are especially unhappy with it.
3. But the more important cost to the speaker is that telling people that they should stop saying certain words, not because those words are likely to be reasonably interpreted as expressing hostility, but simply because some other people dislike those words, is itself something of an affront to dignity and a possible source of offense. Even the good-mannered among us cherish our freedom to speak as we please, and while we try not to be rude (in the sense of slighting others or saying bad things about them), we understandably bristle at being told to stop using this word and start using that one on pain of Being a Bad Person.
A sound explanation that shows why people are reasonably offended by a term (for instance, an explanation to someone coming from Russia, where "black" is insulting much like "yellow" would be, and "negro" is considered the proper scientific term, that in America "negro" is so rarely used that it sounds like a deliberate insult at worst or one of those what-did-he-mean-by-that? archaicisms at best) might soften the sting. But simply saying "most of us like this term, so stop using this other one that you've used all your life" is a legitimate source of offense for those whose speech people are trying to control. It's even more such a source if those people were once taught by then-representatives of the same group that "handicapped" was the better term, and some years later are now told that it's become bad. And it's especially so when the number of forbidden words grows and grows ("rule of thumb," "Chinese wall," "seminal," etc.).
4. On top of that, there's also another substantial cost to the "If you aren't a bigot, stop saying 'handicapped' and say 'disabled' instead" approach: It may actually increase how often the group that one is trying to protect from offense ends up feeling offended.
If handicapped people learn that some people say "disabled" and others say "handicapped," and that neither is evidence of hostility, a few might still bristle at one (or the other); but many will be satisfied by the explanation that decent people use both. But say that everyone is told that "disabled" is the one right term, and some decent people don't go along, whether because of force of habit, strong preference for "handicapped," or just bristling at being told what to say. Then handicapped people who hear the term may well become more offended, because they've been taught that the word is offensive.
People who might even prefer to shrug the term off might feel almost obligated to take it as an insult. If someone calls me "Gene" rather than "Eugene," I'm a little annoyed (that's just not the name I prefer in English), but I assume that it's just because they've fallen into that habit with other Eugenes they know, who do go by Gene in a way that I don't. I assume the speaker's intentions were good, and I think I'm happier for it.
But if someone started a campaign of insisting that calling me Gene is actually rude, perhaps even insulting (because the diminutive implies a diminution of my status), I'd both hear "Gene" a bit less often, and be much more annoyed when I do hear it, precisely because I'll worry that it's a deliberate violation of the New Good Manners Rule and thus a deliberate slight. Those who make the handicapped/disabled issue into a matter of identity politics rather than just a matter of apricot/apricot (or even Gene/Eugene) may thus increase the amount of hurt feelings on both sides.
5. So I think the approach that's more tolerant of speakers, ultimately more likely to avoid offense to the subjects of the speech, and less likely to be subject to the whims of a small minority of activists is generally to tolerate both the old terms and the new terms, and not consider either to be a breach of good manners.
There are exceptions. One, as I noted above, is when one term is so often used pejoratively that reasonable listeners might assume that the current user is using it pejoratively. Another is when the term is so archaic that it will make people wonder whether the speakers must have some ulterior motive in using it (the obvious motive, which is that it's a commonly used term that springs to people's minds naturally, being absent). There may well be others; rules of manners are often not competely simple and crisp. But as to handicapped/disabled, or American Indian/Native American, or black/African American, the let-at-least-a-couple-flowers-bloom approach strikes me as the clearly preferable one.
Related Posts (on one page):
- Handicapped vs. Disabled:
- Why "I'd Prefer If You Called Us X" Isn't Enough of an Argument in My Book:
- Handicapped:
- Picnic:
- Tar Baby:
In a way, you could say we (= polite, civil Americans) agree to avoid certain terms because it's a form of compensation to groups that have been discriminated against or otherwise treated poorly.
It seems like "political correctness" as a trend over the last 25 yrs has paralleled a decline in the large-scale social / political appetite for ongoing substantive reform. For example, since nobody in the majority REALLY wants to face up to the difficult problems still facing black America, members of the majority can pat themselves on the back for remembering to say "African-American".
Meanwhile, the majority can convince African-Americans that they've won some kind of important concession by persuading polite, civil Americans to adopt this term.
It's like the boss who boosts morale by giving her employees impressive-sounding new titles to do the same jobs for the same pay. Cosmetic appeasement distracts from the substantive failure.
I now live in a wheelchair. When I was growing the term used for someone would be a cripple. Some would use the word in a disparaging way but most useage would in a matter of fact way to describe a physical characteristic.
Later the term handicapped came into vogue and the same thing happened , some used the word in a disparaging way, but most used the word as it was meant to be used.
Now we have disabled, and the same thing is happening with this word.
You may have missed the latest itteration - differently -abled.
I think changing the words is just a way for some health professional or sociologist to create momentum for their particular brand of treatment. Changing the word gives them something to talk about and the PR people something to hype up.
There was nothing wrong with any of the words.
My advice is: pay no attention to such effrontery, unless the source is signing your paycheck, or paying your rent.
These terms have the virtue of concision, and of not giving rise to laughable items. For instance, "The Jewish person of Malta", "a Jewish man of Venice" (Shylock). Only Woody Allen could do justice to such tropes.
This can be seen in two modern trends. The first is said generation's preference for reclaiming pejorative labels. There's hardly a pejorative term left for "gay" - even "fag" has been mostly defanged (see "fag hag"). Also the "n-word".
The second is the knowingly-iffy but objectively-acceptable disparaging use of plausibly pejorative labels in inapplicable contexts. As in "don't be so retarded" and "those shoes are totally gay".
In my experience, these people refer to themselves more specifically by tribe. ie/Ojibway, Seminole, Ho Chunk.
Eugene's explanation aside, why not observe the people you wish to label, if possible, and see what terminology they are using? Thus, in Trevor Morrison's case, you do the polite thing if you work in those circles, and use the term "disabled".
Does he apply that same rule to Protestants (who don't protest much these days), to Catholics (whose tastes aren't all that catholic any more), to Conservative Jews (who are really pretty liberal)?
President Bush and other Republicans have an annoying habit of refusing to call the Democratic Party by its official name, referring instead to the Democrat Party (I guess it must be an in joke).
On the other hand, perhaps we should all stop calling Bush a Republican, given his disdain for the republican role of the legislature. From now on, let's call him an Executivist.
1. Strictly seen, neither of the terms "Native American" or "Indigenous American" are factually correct since - according to modern genetic and archaeological evidence - the "Indians" (so called by the founding fathers of the USA) were also immigrants to the Americas, even if this migration occurred some many thousands of years before the Pilgrims. Seen historically, using the term "Siberian-American" would probably be more accurate in terms of actual tribal origins, although not even that is 100% accurate, given the apparently ancient but rare mtDNA European lineage "X" also found in American Indian populations. As the Encyclopedia Smithsonian writes at http://www.si.edu/resource/faq/nmnh/origin.htm:
The problem with the terms "Native American" or "Indigenous American" is thus that they - quite intentionally - presume and encompass some allegedly fundamental truths and conclusions which may not even be true. If the mtDNA lineage X from "Euroasia" preceded the Siberian-Americans, then it would be the American Indians who took the land away from that group, which would make lineage X the first - previously immigrated - inhabitants of America.
2. It is arguable that naming certain segments of the American population in terms of their territorial "origins", whether it be "Native American" or "African American", is discriminatory per se, unless we also follow the same naming practice for all other Americans, thus abandoning the "melting pot" idea which is at the root of the American nation. How about Euro-Americans?
3. The entire concept of grouping modern peoples within America by their "origins" is problematical since many individual citizens have mixed-race lineages. See America's label game misses diversity of race. Tiger Woods, for example, calls himself a "Caublinasian".
4. New DNA genetic studies such as the National Geographic Genographic Project (in concert with IBM and the Waite Family Foundation) make simplistic labels of origin appear rather foolish. Maybe we will one day in the not so distant future be known by our Y and mtDNA haplotypes?
Andis Kaulins, LawPundit
My own typical strategy is to stick with the term I was raised with until it becomes untenable. I'm holding out with "black," though, even against the tide, because it seems to me that that was the first label that group chose for themselves.
One arena where this whole label thing gets tricky, by the way, is in front of juries. If you're trying to describe the defendant, do you call him black, and offend some jurors, or call him african-american, and irritate others?
Telling them to just get over their hangups isn't really an option at that point.
I find this notion rather bizarre. If someone introduces herself by saying "My name is Margeret Smith, but I prefer that folks call me Meg," I don't bristle. If a disabled person says "I prefer 'wheel-chair user' over the term handicapped, I don't bristle. Your bristle trigger is too sensitive. If I ask you to call me Roman Catholic rather than a papist, or Irish rather than Gaelic, I won't consider you to be "A Bad Person," just one who refuses to extend simply courtesies.
In the early days of slavery, slaves were called “blacks.” Then came “Africans.” A little later “darky” or “darkey” (1775) appeared, followed by “Africo-American” (1835), which never really caught on. After the Civil War, “freedman” was used a lot, but died out by 1870. In about 1880, T. Thomas Fortune editor of the New York Age invented “Afro-American.” Later in the 20th Century we got “colored” and “Negro.” In the 1960s “Black” came back to replace “Negro” which later had to compete with “Afro-American” which was eventually replaced by the current usage of “African American.” in the late 20th Century. Of course we always have “people of color,” which is supposed to be better than “colored people” for some unknown reason. Both usages are a little ambiguous as “people of color” should include Chinese, but usually doesn’t in current usage. Clearly we have been going in circles.
At one time “Negro” was not capitalized, but in 1930 the New York Times adopted the capitalization after much lobbying by the Negroes (reverting to usage at the time). In 1933 the Style Manual of the Government Printing Office did likewise so capitalization would appear in government documents and the Congressional Record. The largest Negro Newspaper in 1937, The Pittsburgh Courier, hailed the conversion only to have its star columnist George Schuyler disagree writing:
In closing, there is nothing new about these usage fights except they have been taken to ridiculous extremes in the past ten years. After a certain point in your life you say “the hell with it” I’m going to write the way I want and learn to say “tough shit” more often.
If you were the only representative of your kind, it would be a problem. We would call you whatever you wanted to be called.
The problem: the said group in question has many members with different descriptions of self. Read the good professor's post again for better comprehension.
Thanks for the reading comprehension tip. It really made my day.
2. Some classes are socially or even intrinsically perjorative. Most people, for example, would agree that it is better to hear than not to hear, or better to be able to walk than otherwise. And (this is a normative statement-- not an ethical one) calling a widely despised group of people by a euphemism does not make them less despised. So the euphemism comes to acquire a negative connotation with time. So the widespread use of 'handicapped' started as a polite way to describe "cripples," etc. Now it has a negative connotation of its own. Prediction: in 30 years we will be asked to use a term other than 'disabled.'
3. Being asked to change ones usage itself breeds resentment. If someone innocently calls me a Yankee and I demand to be called an American, sr some such thing, I will come across as prickly and oversensitive. But...
4. If Prof. Volokh prefers 'Eugene.' or even 'Prof. Volokh' to 'Gene,' I'll do this as a matter of courtesy. But if he wants me to call him 'Your Briliant Highness,' then I'll draw the line. Analogize to 'saints,' etc. My main problem with African-American is that it is 7 syllables long, and hard to say. It also is not clear (here in NY) whether it refers as well to immigrants from the Carribean or West Africa. But 'African' is a better analog to most other ethnic monikers, which are based on geography (or, in the case of Jews, ancient geography) rather than physical characteristics.
'Cult' is a good example word that isn't pejorative in scholarly speech, in its Latin original ('cultus', religion, worship, etc.) or in any foreign language but has become so in everyday English where cults are invariably wacky.
I prefer to use 'Mormons' rather than 'Saints', but then logically should I object to 'Orthodox' (i.e. 'correct doctrine'), or 'Catholic' (i.e. 'universal')? There aren't any good substitutes, so maybe it's enough that the significance of their meanings is buried in the 'decent obscurity of a learned language'.
The question is what to do about it. On the one hand, you can point out that they are being dopey, and refuse to go along, which can have certain social or even professional consequences for you. On the other hand, you can go along and, in some sense, compromise your own integrity.
It is not clear there is any good rule to tell you what to do.
When someone is trying to popularize a term that's not commonly in use, such as Saint for Mormon or "differently abled" for "disabled," it's much more likely to retain in many speakers' and listeners' minds its literal meaning. And those people might be reluctant to use the term precisely because they don't want to evoke that literal meaning.
In general, I am happy to use whatever term doesn't make me worry that I am pissing someone off. But I run into trouble with things like Black versus African American. I think Black is generally accepted but I always worry a bit when I use it that someone in the audience will be offended. On the other hand African American is a mouthful and I think it smacks of someone who is "trying to hard." It's the term someone might use if they are too conscious of the whole race issue and may even be masking some rascist tendencies by choosing their words too carefully.
My last point, has anyone ever been in the situation where they want to describe a minority to someone else but they avoid saying that the person is Asian, Black, Hispanic, etc? So instead of saying, "you know Fred, the black guy in accounting" you give your listener the, "he's 6 feet tall, brown eyes, sits by the door . . ." No matter how useful it might be in describing the person, I always they a little awkward about using the persons race to describe them. Am I alone here?
See http://www.delawaretribeofindians.nsn.us/ ("The Delaware Tribe of Indians")
But see http://www.hopi.nsn.us/history.asp
("Our continual occupancy of the area since 500 A.D. gives Hopi people the longest authenticated history of occupation of a single area by any Native American tribe in the United States.")
So it is far from clear that "Native American is the preferred term.
On the African American point, one question that arises is how frequently do you reasonably get to change the word. African Americans have been known over the last 50 years as "colored" "negro" "black" "African American." How long do you have to stick with a preferred term before it becomes offensive rather than preferred?
Dan
Politicians have special communication issues because their words are often read and later quoted by political opponents. The natural evolution of language presents difficult challenges for them.
Here's why I think this.
Until we eliminate prejudice, perfectly good non-pejorative words will take on pejorative meanings because those who dislike a certain group or trait will use tone, inflection, eye-rolls or special context when they apply that word to describe those people. Initially, very distinct eye-rolls etc. will be required to denote the pejorative sense. (Think Dana Carvey and "that's special".) Once the pejorative sense catches on fully, the tone and or eye-rolls are no longer required.
In spoken language, the listener can often hear the difference between a pejorative use and a non-pejorative use. In written transcripts, they often can't. If the pejorative use is beginning to catch on, a political opponent quoting a politician can easily make them sound like someone using the word pejoratively. Some who have heard the pejorative use will suspect it was used this way.
For better or worse, this means that if you are a politicians whose speech is reported in writing or quoted by others, it may be prudent to vigilantly track which new words are now sometimes used pejoratively and substitute other words. If you don't, you will sometimes find yourself sidetracked by accusations of bigotry. These will be followed by long discussions of your guilt or innocence. The overwhelming majority of people may agree you are innocent.
But, being cleared in the minds of the majority doesn't solve your biggest problem which is: Whatever message you meant to get out during a speech will be forgotten. This might not be important to most people, but... What did Mitt Romeny intend to accomplish when he spoke to hundreds in Ames, Iowa? Surely he did not intend America to debate the precise meaning of "tar baby"!
So, avoiding words that advocates claim have acquired a pejorative sense for no other reason than the fact they claim this -- can help politicians avoid being derailed!
--- ---
Warning: My ridiculously long comment contains a split infinitive.
as to your distinction between LDS and Catholics (that lower case "catholic" has pretty much been superseded by the upper case religion), what do you say about Conservative Judaism? Are you willing to refer to Christian Scientists, for that matter?
i don't challenge your right to be idiosyncratic about groups and names, but i think that your approach to Mormons undermines your broader argument -- it just makes you look ornery.
My sense is that "Oriental" sounds more archaic than offensive. I know older (as in over 50) Koreans, Chinese, and Japanese who use the term themselves, but younger people never would when refering to people. Of course one also rarely refers to "the Orient" these days unless trying to be consciously poetic/archaic.
As for the range of "Asian" v. "Oriental," remember that "the Orient" originally included (or primarily referred to) the Middle East and what we sometimes refer to as "Asia Minor." Hence Said's book was titled Orientalism though it had nothing to do with China, Japan, or Korea. As an academic field, "Asian Studies" typically includes India, Nepal, and all of South East Asian, in addition to China, Korea and Japan. "East Asian Studies" typically refers primarily to China, Korea, and Japan, with Vietnam and Tibet sometimes thrown in for good measure.
Negro is one of the major races found on earth. African American is silly. If it's meant to refer to Negroes, it must be amended to Sub-Saharan African American. Black as the counterpoint to White? That's also fine with me, although if the demographers are correct, Americans will all be shades of brown in the not to distant future, and that too will be fine with me.
Before PC, polite language was neutral and meant only to convey information and Americans weren't hyphenated, so there was no problem with geography, for instance, people from India used to be referred to as East Indians to distinguish them from American Indians, but if these folks feel left out, they can be referred to as Indian-Americans with no danger of confusion.
Why did we allow the haters to appropriate the perfectly good English words that described us and turn them on their heads?
A good friend of mine came across two young black men in a grocery store where he sells wholsale. One black guy was trying to describe one of the managers of the store to the other, but the other guy couldn't put a face to the name. My friend stepped in and pointed out that the guy was the black manager. That worked for them and the misunderstanding was immediately cleared.
The news media have stopped giving the racial characteristics of the people the police are looking for. How do you describe the difference between an Asian and a Hispanic without resorting to stereotypes that are worse than the racial classifications?
An interesting analogue is the changing terms for the outcaste group in Japan that used to be called "eta" (or worse) and then "burakumin" and now any number of seemingly-innocuous things.
The reference to "womyn" reminded me of the neutralization of common terms such as "actor" referring to both men and women, also chairman/chairwomen/chairperson, etc. I have a hard time believing that this same process would be applied to much stricter languages with masculine, feminine, or neuter forms. Is this not an issue with those languages, or is there an active attempt at change among some significant percentage of those populations?
The early members of the LDS Church called themselves Saints, I have heard General Authorities in talks referring to the membership as saints, but I have never ever heard someone refer to themselves as a Saint.
When asked most people I know refer to themselves as LDS or Mormon. I personally prefer LDS.
Maybe I missed a memo.
In a similar vein, a number of reservation high schools have adopted "Red Skins" or "Braves" for their teams' names. As this seems to be an implicit invitation for persons outside of the ethnic group to use these names (i.e., “We’re playing the Red Skins tonight”), this seems different from the custom that members of the same ethnic group can use otherwise unacceptable terms to refer to themselves and each other.
As to the etymology of "Oriental," I always understood it to mean "Eastern," just as "Occidental" means "Western." Hence, persons from the East (and it doesn't get much farther East than East Asia) are from the Orient. Similarly, Occidental College is located in California, on the West Coast of North America. Admittedly, no-one calls whites "Occidentals," but if they did, it wouldn't strike me as particularly offensive to be referred to as, essentially, a "Westerner."
This also reminds me of the classic Simpsons exchange:
Apu: Today, I am no longer an Indian living in America. I am an Indian-American.
Lisa: You know, in a way, all Americans are immigrants. Except, of course Native Americans.
Homer: Yeah, Native Americans like us.
Lisa: No, I mean American Indians.
Apu: Like me.
Of course the "new" term could have a different content than the "old" term, which is usually part of the point. If you want to call a preference for this new content "ideological", and want to reject it because you disagree with the implied ideology, then fine--but then that means you are in fact taking an ideological stand by insisting on the "old" term instead.
So, for example, obviously it is true that the term "African-American" is consciously designed to emphasize that the members of the group are a racial subset of Americans, rather than simply members of a race. And so perhaps a preference for "African-American" over a term like "black" indicates an ideological commitment to the idea that people should be emphasizing in part that members of this group share a nationality with their fellow Americans, even while acknowledging that they can be distinguished from some of their other fellow Americans by their race.
But if all that is true, then of course one who insists on using "black" instead of "African-American" should have to justify this preference on ideological grounds. Indeed, it is precisely because these are not identical terms that one cannot simply point to mere inertia as a reason to stick with the "old" term.
And I think it is equally obvious that one could be subject to criticism on ideological grounds for having such a preference. So, for example, if you are resistant to the notion of emphasizing that members of a certain group share a common nationality with their fellow Americans, and would prefer to emphasize only their race, then you might well be validly criticized for that preference. Of course, you might also be validly criticized for having the opposite preference. My point is just that insofar as your preference is ideological, you can be criticized on ideological grounds.
In short, it makes no sense to me to offer ideological grounds as a reason for refusing to adopt a "new" term, and then to claim that you should be immune from criticism for preferring the "old" term. Rather, it seems to me that you could be criticized precisely to the extent that we think your ideology, as expressed by this preference, is worth criticizing.
Miller is right, about the "LDS" use, though I would note that historically "Mormon" is a pejorative. Which brings up the issue of how long a pejorative needs to be used before it is ok to use it instead of a polite term.
I don't mean to suggest that a person could not have nonideological reasons for preferring a term (eg, it is shorter, or you think it is more poetic, or you view it as traditional and favor tradition, or so forth). In those cases, one would not necessarily need an ideological justification for the preference. But even in that case, one might be asked to explain why one thinks that these other considerations should trump any differences in ideological content--or, in fact, vice-versa for those who prefer a different term on ideological grounds. And one's answer to such questions (again, either way) could be subject to criticism as well.
It sucks to not be able to walk, and much of the word-games that go on with changing the nomenclature is an attempt to deny the fact that the subject of the sentence got a crappy lot in the life lottery.
It sucks not being able to see, or not being able to hear. And if you point out a person's shortcomings, they are going to "bristle." Unfortunately, using an accurate term for someone's shortcomings points those shortcomings out. So we (meaning group members and/or activists) push for change in the language to try to erase the "shortcomings" (apologies to midgets, er.. little persons, er... what is the term nowadays?).
The situation is a little more fuzzy with "Blacks" and "Indians" because the shortcomings there are either (a) less obvious or perhaps more often (b) imagined. Still, people do not want to be reminded of the fact that other people don't like them. (Some of us got very used to that in junior high school.)
And it doesn't really matter *why* people don't like a group, either -- the group gets upset at the negative feelings anyway. Some people don't like Blacks because Blacks can appear to be imprisoned more often, leading to the (reasonable if not completely proven) inference that they commit more crime per capita. Some people don't like African Americans because the Negro is inherently inferior — those people are bigots and that's what their parents taught them. Whether the reasons are reasonable, understandable, silly, or offensive, lucia's right that this is the root of the problem: it's the attitudes, not the language. And changing the language is an attempt to escape attitudes (or the recognition of an unfortunate physical reality for the blind, deaf, and handicapped).
And frankly, Professor Volokh's (very well-argued) analysis is right when it says that people bristle at being told not to call a spade a spade. When Latina/o came into being, I just about vomitted. I still call myself Hispanic or Chicano (when I'm bothering with racial labels at all), and once you've understood that name changes like this are really just attempts to deny/escape from a reality that you don't like, they're kind of offensive. At the very least, you start to understand that using them makes you look sad, pathetic, and either desperate for or demanding of the approval of a generally indifferent world.
Which is why we have that silly saying about sticks and stones.
I started to include comments on the feminist assault on language, but perhaps I'll wait until Eugene will write on changing the English language for reasons of political ideology.
2 -- "Mormons" is pejorative? I had no idea. What's the story behind that one? I've never met a Mormon who seemed bothered by the term, but I don't know that many Mormons.
You don't have to agree with a group to call it by its proper designation (for instance, all the various terrorist groups whose name translations imply they are acting in behalf of God -- we still call them by their various organizations' names.)
As noted above, surely the Protestants aren't spending much time "protesting" anymore. Shan't we just call them "Unorthodoxes" or some such? No, because every member of the group self-identifies as "Protestant."
The term "Mormon" for Latter-day Saints has a history of perjorative use, although it is not strictly so. But, the church itself (by that, I mean the leadership) prefers the use of "Saint," (the official instruction to the media is: "When referring to Church members, the term “Latter-day Saints” is preferred, though 'Mormons' is acceptable." Found here.) Since this is not a preference that changes every few years, it seems reasonable to use the term.
So, why do people so fluidly change from preferred term to preferred term for various races, yet have such a hard time calling the LDS people by their preferred name? It's not as though the Saints actually believe that they are all "saintly" and perfect -- it's actually a historical term that refers back to the original followers of Christ (eg. Paul's epistle to the saints at Corinth was not addressed to a bunch of "saintly" people, just followers of Christ - hence, the "latter-day" part of LDS). The word "saint" has come to mean "a person officially recognized, especially by canonization, as being entitled to public veneration and capable of interceding for people on earth," or "an extremely virtuous person." The LDS church does not canonize people, but they'll tell you that they aspire to virtue. I don't see the big deal with recognizing that.
I think people in general are reluctant to call the Saints by their proper designation because they feel that using the term "saint" somehow validates a group that they oppose. But isn't giving people validation the reason we are so careful about the labels we give them (eg. African-American, Native American, disabled, etc.)?
Admittedly, it's not fun trying to avoid stumbling over the which term is okay today and which is no longer vogue, but I think it is important to be as polite as possible to other people. My general rule is to just ask a person what their preferred identifier is (be it for their race, religion, politcal alignment, or even their name), or if they even care. Then I go with that. But dealing with folks individually is easier that dealing with groups of people whose individuals may have different preferences.
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As someone with many, many Indian-American friends, this is something that I've noticed had led many ironic insensitive situations when provide clarification by saying, as in the movie Good Will Hunting, "Dots, not feathers." People immediately understand the meaning, but the explication relies on stereotypes that are easily considered offensive.
Secondly, I noticed that (if I'm not the only one) it tends to be a direct replacement for "oriental" which tended to mean East Asian, so most usage in the US of Asian (as a PC word) means East Asian, eg not including Indian, Pakistani etc. However, I noticed that in the UK, Asian often descibes Indian. I think its far too vague.
As for why we keep changing the words, I think its the liberal guilt complex; similarly to wanting to change "crippled" to "handicapped" to "disabled", the left believes that minorities are still so oppressed by the man that it is the same as being blind or in a wheelchair and hence you have to keep changing the name to sound nicer and feel less guilty that you have two working legs. Then "differently abled" additionally tries to pretend that there is nothing wrong, and similarly "African-American" and "Asian-American" attempt to make everyone sound as similar as possible, accentuating similarities instead of differences, a form of relativistic PC that denies cultural differences in the attempt to force a sense of equality. Obviously we want equality before the law, but must we put ourselves in a blender and aim for grey?
Finally, I want to point out that this drive for PC is in part guilt but also in part condescending, differences between cultures - recongizing that sometimes there is not moral equality (eg if the country you come from happens to be a dictatorship, repressive against women, etc) but that this is not inherant in a race - is good. Forcing homogeneity and pretense of moral relativism through language just makes the melting pot stew become a blended potato soup. Then layers of "multi-culturalism" are added on top, forcing acceptance of cultures that are not morally equal - consider Australia where they decided that beating your wife is okay if you are Muslim (secondhand link as the original is missing).
Again, this comes from a guilt complex and misunderstanding about what causes differences. Westerner would never be considered a pejorative term because we tend to be proud of our culture. However the liberal sense is that we are the oppressor, and hence pointing out that another group is not western must tend to be pejorative. Out of guilt that we are oppressing the other groups, we should keep softening the name, describing less and homogenizing more. Its condescending and innacurate.
Anyway, that is my sense of the misguided PC attempts. Still I do always find myself trying to use the "right" words. I would like to shake the feeling hat I must and instead depend on my own confidence that I do not mean harm, and let the recipient of the words tell me differently if I offend.
Doesn't a term like "African-American" actually try to have it both ways? In other words, it seems to be trying to emphasize both the differences and the commonalities at the same time.
cathy :-)
Not really. You wouldn't be distinguishing blacks from whites at all (might as well call them "person") if you just said "American". You start with the word "black" and change it to "African-American" if you want to move in the direction of homogeneity.
Or (c) the shortcoming is a social construct imposed by others, rather than being intrinsic or imagined. But members of these groups appreciate the normative disrespect nevertheless.
To change the subject, the "oriental" to "Asian" shift may reflect the evolution of East Asians from a reletavely exotic and oppressed minority to one that is well-integrated into the Americn mainstream. Do any of you remember the radio ads in Los Angeles in the late 60's- early '70's in which an accented voice sang, "Orient yourself [pause] To Bank of To-okyo [gong]?"
And "Moslem" and "Muslim" are most definitely not pronounced the same. Even more so for "Beijing" and "Peking". Are you serious?
I think it fits into the "not cost free to the speaker" part of the original article.
Speaking as a man who is attracted to other men, I call myself "gay" and have noticed that there is a very high correlation at present between people who support us (who tend to use "gay") and people who oppose us (who tend to use "homosexual").
I don't actually take offense to either term, and I really don't know too many other people who do. But it is hard not to notice the word choice, and cue in on it. When I find someone using "homosexual" I tend to look for the antipathy. I have shared with people that they should be aware how the word choice is often perceived. At the same time, I have never met a single person who told me that they preferred "homosexual" as their self-identity.
This isn't quite the same as the "it is rude to use that word" thing, but it clearly lives in the same neighborhood.
I can imagine some other similar situations. I ran into someone a while back who was talking about "Coloreds" -- and you can imagine my immediate assumption of her views, which turned out to be quite accurate.
I rely on actual members of a given group to tell me their preferences.
Not sure how it fits into the general topic, but thought I'd toss that in.
Wait, what's wrong with seminal? And are there really a lot of people getting upset about rule of thumb? I rarely use it because it seems everyone wants to tell you the story behind it, which is tiring, but I usually didn't note any hostility behind it.
Absolutely. I believe that the "correct" pronunciations are the same, but that's not really a defense when the "incorrect" pronunciation is so widespread. Much better to use something less likely to be mispronounced.
But given that Mormons have generally not been called Saints by the Gentiles, insisting on the label today will rightly lead lots of outsiders to bristle, because the word Saint today has a strong non-Mormon meaning that speakers may not like feeling pressured into evoking. Few people have this reaction to Catholic or Protestant, because those words have been largely leached of their original lower-case meanings. It also doesn't help that "saint" is a positive term, and "call me by this positive-sounding term" is likely to understandably lead to more resistance than "call me by this neutral-sounding term"; people who don't much care whether they're associating someone (at his request) with protesting or conservatism might dislike feeling pressured to associate him with sainthood.
"Conservative Jew" is more complex, partly because the label is relatively apt under one definition of the term -- today, Conservative Jews in America are seen as being "conservative" in the sense of having a somewhat more traditionalist approach to religion than the majority of American Jews (who are either secular or Reform) -- partly because the term has been in common use (among outsiders as well as insiders) for at least a century, and partly because the term is not as strongly positive as saint. The label leads to some ambiguity when people are talking about both religion and politics, so it's not perfect. But, as with Catholic and Protestant, and unlike with Saint, it's a relatively old term in broad public use.
This is all a long way of reinforcing the earlier point, which I would think should be descriptively uncontroversial: When a more recent meaning of a term is novel, people are more likely to think about the earlier meaning, and thus be reluctant to label someone "Saint" if they're saintly. When the more recent meaning is quite old, people are less likely to think about the earlier meaning, and thus not focus much on whether a "Protestant" is actually protesting.
My last point, has anyone ever been in the situation where they want to describe a minority to someone else but they avoid saying that the person is Asian, Black, Hispanic, etc? So instead of saying, "you know Fred, the black guy in accounting" you give your listener the, "he's 6 feet tall, brown eyes, sits by the door . . ." No matter how useful it might be in describing the person, I always they a little awkward about using the persons race to describe them. Am I alone here?
I once was watching a boxing match between a black and a white man. They were both wearing similarly colored boxing trunks but with different colored piping. I think blue with yellow piping vs. blue with white piping. Neither were famous enough to refer to by name and hope for recognition. A friend came in and asked about the fight, something along the lines of who's winning. I started to try to explain which boxer was which by name, then I examined their trunks and pointed that out. Only after about a minute of confusion did I even think to say, the black guy is Joe and the white guy is Steve and I think the black guy is doing x,y,z and the white guy is doing a,b,c.
I'm not sure what you are getting at with the Beijing/Peking difference here. "Peking" is a (slightly altered) version of the Wade-Giles Romanization for 北京. "Beijing" uses the Hanyu pinyin Romanization system that has been used by the PRC for about the last 50 years and is now used pretty much world-wide (even, increasingly, in Taiwan). There is only one way that those characters should be pronounced in the standard Mandarin dialect, and in this case "Beijing" is a pretty close approximation of those sounds. Native English speakers almost always pronounce "Peking" as "pay-king" when they should be saying "bay-jing." What's the power-play here? One pronunciation is simply correct and the other isn't. One would not be readily understood by a native speaker of standard northern Mandarin and the other would. If one wants to make a political statement, call it "Beiping" 北平, as this removes the word "capital" and thus denotes that one denies the legitimacy of the CCP, prefering to consider the old ROC capital of Nanjing 南京 (Wade-Giles: "Nanking") as the true capital. But they rarely even do this in Taiwan anymore.
I'm not sure I understand. I agree that the second part of "African-American" is intended to emphasize a commonality with other Americans (at least insofar as this term is not being used to distinguish African-Americans from non-American people with an African origin). But the first part is obviously intended to emphasize a distinction from other Americans (one based on differences in continental origin).
So, I agree that "African-American" includes an element of "homogeneity" which is lacking in "black". But doesn't it also include an element of heterogeneity that would be lacking in "American"? And that was my point: "African-American" appears consciously designed to simultaneously emphasize one element of homogeneity (common nationality) and one element of heterogeneity (a distinction based on continental origin).
Now, maybe you have a preference for a term like "black" because it ONLY emphasizes heterogeneity and contains NO element of homogeneity. But it seems obviously wrong to me to say that "African-American" represents an "attempt to make everyone sound as similar as possible, accentuating similarities instead of differences." As you noted, the term that would make everyone sound as similar as possible would be "American" (or "person" if you wanted to expand the possible contrast class to non-Americans as well, and so on). But "African-American", in contrast, clearly represents an attempt to accentuate both some similarities AND some differences at the same time.
And again, while you may have reason for preferring a term that ONLY accentuates differences, it isn't obvious to me that a term which tries to accentuate BOTH some similarities and some differences at the same time is necessarily a bad idea.
And "Moslem" and "Muslim" are most definitely not pronounced the same. Even more so for "Beijing" and "Peking".
Absolutely. I believe that the "correct" pronunciations are the same, but that's not really a defense when the "incorrect" pronunciation is so widespread. Much better to use something less likely to be mispronounced.
A year ago I was criticized for pronouncing "Iran" with "a" as in "pan" instead of having the vowel sound in "hot."
This is in the same vein as insisting that the land of Daniel Ortega and the Somozas be pronounced Hee-kah-rrrah-guah— don't you dare use a shord vowel, or use an English sounding "r" I know an otherwise very nice Francophone who insists that his name (spelled Roy) be prnounced "Rrrrghwah." a tdifficult task for many Anglophones. It's easy to take umbrage at people pronouncing things the way the would in their own language, I suppose.
Your faithful correspondent,
Steve
I can talk about "Mormons" without recalling a member of that church I once knew who was far from saintly, but "Latter-Day Saints" is bound to bring that atypical individual to mind.
An immigrant from Africa is an African-American, whether black, white, or otherwise. Jesse Jackson and I are both native Americans - we were born here, although his ancestors came from Africa and mine from Europe. The PC usage of those terms leads to utterly silly results, such as calling a dark-complected French citizen an "African-American"...
What I have found over the last 18 years is that the parents of kids like mine have much more important things to worry about than adjectives. Most of the people who enter into these sort of debates are "patient advocates" or ideologues (not that there isn't a great deal of overlap).
The one thing that does make me bristle is when people use "that's retarded" as a slur.
(Remember french class when you couldn't remember all those silly genders of things without gender, and tried to get away with saying "luh" for both "le" and "la"? I think that my french teacher's most common phrase was, "Luh?!?!? Le ou la, mademoiselle!")
cathy :-)
Then there is "Negro", which comes from the Spanish for "black". I suspect the main issue with "Negro" is that anyone with a southern accent, including black Americans, has trouble pronouncing it, without sounding at least somewhat like "nigger".
Moreover, for something like the name of an organized group in particular, it seems really odd to me to insist on some literal, noncontextual, meaning of the term "Saints". I don't, for example, assume that the "Detroit Tigers" have fuzzy tails and sharp teeth, and I actually think that terms like "Latter-Day Saints" (or "Roman Catholics" for that matter) fall into this "team name" category.
In other words, the whole idea in these cases is for groups to give themselves aspirational names (tigers are ferocious, catholics are universal, saints are virtuous, etc.). And the convention seems to be to call people by those aspirational names, even when you are not necessarily a fan of that particular team. And because that is the convention, no one assumes you actually agree with the aspirational description simply because you use the term. So, it makes no sense to me to insist on using a different "team name" on the ground that you personally do not think the literal meaning of the team name applies to the members of that team.
Yeah... but as I said, there would be no word at all if you didn't make a distinction. You can't replace "black" with "American", you've lost the meaning, the point; you are no longer replacing a word with anything.
As a word used to distinguish between two things, you require the heterogeneity aspect. My point is that replacing ONLY heterogeneity with hetero-homo mix is a movement toward homogeneity. You can't really argue with that.
Do you actually engage in conversation and listen to how people speak? Do you really think "native-American speakers" (I am assuming you don't mean Indians) pronounce "Maslam, Meslom and Muslum" identically? Really?
I felt that one of the civilizing duties of a parent was to get them past seeking for casual insults in every-day indiiferent life, and to find ways to be happier as they wandered through life.
Modern academia and the over-educated strive to undo this simple lesson.
Let's try to avoid casting aspersions on each other's motivations. I thought I'd actually set forth a pretty sensible argument, which was laid out at some length, and which tracks human psychology.
Since I suppose that argument wasn't effective, let me try with an analogy. Call your daughter Grace, and she probably won't encounter many problems as a result of that. Call her Beauty, and people would think that's a little conceited of you, and perhaps even of her.
What's the difference? Grace is an old, familiar name, and when people hear the name "Grace" they hear the name much more than the trait. Beauty is not a familiar name (and here what matters isn't how long it's been in use in your family or in your minority religious group but rather how commonly it's been used by society at large), so when people hear the name "Beauty" they do draw the connection to the trait, and might find that connection annoying. It's not that anyone has personal esthetic or philosophical preferences for Grace over Beauty; it's all about how common the name has been. Likewise for Catholic and Saint.
By the way, having spent a considerable amount of time in Utah, my personal experience has been that most Mormons refer to themselves as "LDS," as in, "Are you LDS?" Saints is a bit of an anachronism, something that you'd expect to hear during a discussion of pioneer days.
2. Stevethepatentguy: Ten Little Indians first came out in Britain, where it was titled Ten Little Niggers. It was retitled and rewritten for the American market.
3. The official, accept-no-substitutes, take-no-prisoners term for Orientals, especially in academia, is Asian-Pacific Islanders, as though Kazaks and Polynesians had anything in common.
4. African-American became mandatory the very day Jesse Jackson ordered the media to use it. The change was immediate and so thorough that theBoston Globe had an editorial the next day about getting the city budget in the African-American. I am not making this up.
When the term "African-American" first came into use, it appeared to me that the intent was more to emphasize the differences ("African") rather than the commonalities ("American"). It was definitely an ideological thing, not an attempt at an "accurate" description. Really, discussions of whether these descriptions (for example, "Native American") are accurate are beside the point, because that is not the intent of those coining these phrases. (In Canada they talk about the aboriginal people, but if you used that in the U.S. I think it would be found offensive.) In practice, Native American is defined as "the people who where here just before the white guys showed up".
Mormon - I know a lot of Mormons, and that is what they call themselves. So I don't think they consider it pejorative anymore.
Latino and/or Hispanic - my impression is that these were basically to replace "Mexican", which had become pejorative (at least in the Pacific Northwest when I was growing up, and Mexican/Latinos/Hispanics were rarely seen ).
In my youth "retarded" as a description was not pejorative, but "retard" as a noun certainly was. (I've gotten in trouble when I've commented on the style of wearing baseball caps backwards, my comment was "When I was young the only people who wore baseball caps backwards were welders and retards.")
Looking over my post, I saw "guys". For years I have used "guy" as a non-gender specific term, because I was told that "gal" was offensive, so you could not say "guys and gals". I've even been called on for "lady", which I have always used as a term of respect.
George Carlin has a wonderful routine about how none of these words are in and of themselves offensive, it is the context and intention that matters. (My own example, "lady" is respectful, unless followed by "of the night".)
Names - my given name is "Ray" not "Raymond", but most assume "Ray" is shorthand. I just politely correct them. But if you start doing the "You can call me Ray, or you can call me Jay..." routine around me I might hurt you, cause I've heard it a lot and it stopped being funny around the 200th time.
I've been told by Jewish friends that Jew can be indeed offensive and should be avoided, but maybe this is not as common as I thought.
"How much more established does the church need to be?"
It takes a good long while. It also takes more than time. It takes familiarity, which has only happened fairly recently. It also takes a certain history. In Utah, I imagine there is more willingness. However for the rest of the country, especially in the midwest/east who were the very ones who persecuted them, it takes a quite longer than good long while. A religion which somehow retained a neutral opinion among society could likely have better and quicker success getting established.
For that matter, sometimes history and culture can be an almost overwhelming barrier. Being a Protestant, even to this day, in a primarily Catholic country is seen as an oddity.
The problem, also, with the word Saint, and being called saint is that it is still a prevalent word with multiple meanings. To call a specific group of people Saints is, in a way, to give them almost a copyright over the word. Saying Protestant says something specific about a group of religious people and their basic beliefs on certain topics. It was a word invented for a specific description. Saying Catholic almost certainly now refers to the Roman Catholic church even if catholic does exist as a separate word, something that does in fact cause a bit of confusion when reciting the Apostle's creed.
Saying Saints, however, isn't descriptive unless one already knows the specific subject in question. The New Orleans Saints, for instance, are not referring to the LDS church. When the Saints Go Marching In isn't a song about the founding of Utah. In a way it's trying to own a word that others are not willing to release because it's a word that still has significant and varied usage in multiple contexts.
One could argue Catholics do this as well, only they do in fact have a good claim on the word catholic, a unified church which others departed from later.
With these in mind it will almost certainly never be the case that those in the LDS church will be popularly called Saints. Don't take it personally. How many people would call Quakers according to their preferred term of "Friends". Quakers have been around since before the founding of America and still have yet to get people to use their own preferred terminology.
Wait, what's wrong with "Chinese wall?"
Dan
I haven't heard anyone take offense at "Moslem"; it is just considered archaic. The spelling reflects a more South Asian pronounciation