Symbolic anti-racism

[liv]

So I'm seeing a pattern which has been around for a while, but recent instances of it. That is, people from a discriminated ethnic minority complain about lethal or life-destroying racist violence, and as part of that, happen to mention that the default language in a particular field is racist. Institutions cynically seize on, oh, we can change the language, because that's cheap and doesn't require any actual systematic change. White or otherwise advantaged people who are basically well-meaning but not particularly educated about the issues say, well, it seems a bit silly but I guess I'll change my language. And sometimes they get over-excited about how they're doing good anti-racism and start having internal discussions, without any reference to the original activist group or anyone actually affected, about other simple, low-effort vocabulary changes they could make. And some of them really are silly because they're not actually relevant to the original discrimination.

Then you get other people who are also basically well-meaning but right-leaning, who look at the outcomes of these kinds of discussions and think, I don't think changing that wording is going to do any good, and the actually the word in question has a totally innocent etymology, so I won't bother. They kind of get the impression that activists are being silly and focusing on trivial things, not realizing that they were originally raising serious issues and got diverted to language trivialities. It can easily become a kind of shibboleth anyway, where people who want to be non-racist update their language. Meaning that if someone from the minority group encounters people using the older terms, they have good reason to suspect that those people may in fact hold racist views.

And cynical, not at all well-meaning right-wing agitators seize on this and claim it's censorship or Orwellian Newspeak or cancel culture or 'compelled speech' and start ranting about how they have a right to use the older terminology that may or may not be offensive. They deliberately obfuscate genuine campaigns to remove actual racial slurs, with a largely silly euphemism treadmill about language that few people are actually offended by. Well-meant but misguided attempts to drive progressive language change are portrayed as "political correctness gone mad" or "woke nonsense". Any time anyone speaks up about actual racism, they are portrayed as campaigning for language change, and thereby silencing the free speech of anyone who might disagree with them.

This happened in the late 20th century when educational reformers tried to make the school curriculum less overtly racist, and it ended up being reported as Marxist local authorities trying to ban the word "blackboard" because "black" is offensive. It happened at the turn of the 21^st century with the nonsense about replacing "Christmas" with "Winterval" supposedly in order to avoid offending Muslims.

I think we're seeing the same thing again with the response to the Black Lives Matter movement. In the course of protesting about police murdering Black people, some Confederate statues were defaced, and the statue of unpleasant slaver Colston in Bristol got thrown into the sea. So well-meaning people started up debates about which statues have too close connections to slavery and colonialist violence. But actually #BLM was never asking for statues of slavers to be removed, they were demanding action to end police killings, and they destroyed some statues in the course of protests, as part of a bid to draw media attention. You can argue about whether this is a legitimate or effective tactic, sure, but it's not that #BLM hate statues. The problem is that now we have a debate, mostly between white people as far as I can see, about whether taking down statues erases history, whether the evil aggressive anti-racists are destroying "our" heritage. And neo-Nazis marching in cities, including London, claiming to be "protecting" statues that nobody was ever contemplating damaging.

And now the Last Night of the Proms palaver. The BBC decided to play an instrumental only version of the two classic Last Night anthems, Rule, Britannia, and Land of hope and glory, because of Covid restrictions, meaning there will be no live audience and the songs will sound a bit crap produced by a choir who are appropriately distanced. And some commentators completely made up an untrue rumour about how anti-racist activists had "cancelled" the songs because of their imperialist and colonialist lyrics and references to slavery. Again, there was a huge and pointless debate about whether we should in fact be singing these dated and offensive songs. Also lots of deliberately ridiculous hypotheticals of, whatever will these silly Millennials cancel next? were accepted as fact and raised an outcry from people who thought their cultural touchstones were somehow under attack. Boris Johnson made a bullshit statement about how we should be proud of our Empire and stop being so wet and apologetic. And again, the end point is neo-Nazi marches demanding to "protect" white culture from foreigners and liberals.

Because the issue has become so twisted, plenty of people who are basically sympathetic to groups that want less racism in society, are finding themselves taking the side of neo-Nazis because they generally think that we shouldn't go around banning all songs with a positive view of the British Empire. It happens with other activisms as well, like disabled people want equal rights to employment and housing and freedom from violence, but we keep having debates about whether we should change the word "disabled" to something daft like "differently abled" or "handicapable". Trans people want to be able to go through their lives without harassment and violence, not to ban the word "mother".

I'm broadly in favour of being careful with my language choice, aka "political correctness". But I understand why some people are against it, because the thing they're against is a phantom. And language change should never be a priority over real justice.

Comments

[cjwatson]

We get a similar phenomenon in tech too, with the starting point being attempts to move away from terms like "slave" and "blacklist" used as jargon. The objectors tend to divide into people who think that the work to migrate to less freighted terms is basically busywork and a distraction from actually improving the lives of marginalised people in tech, and the people who can also be found vigorously gatekeeping any more concrete attempt to reach out to or improve things for people other than white men. The former can often be persuaded by picking terms that are actually more accurate/descriptive as well as less objectionable; the latter are probably never going to be persuaded, and have to be worked around, ignored, or ejected.

Like you I'm broadly in favour of being careful with language choice, especially if we get to use more accurate terms into the bargain, but I can see why some people deprioritise it. One very slight silver lining is that in smallish communities this sort of debate is a really good way of finding problems in the community: since engaging with the debate is low-effort, it becomes a magnet for people who want to use it to foment culture war, and now you know who you're likely to need to work around, ignore, or eject when trying to do anything with higher stakes. Doesn't really help with large communities or society at large, of course.

[liv]

Yeah, the whole renaming of master-slave metaphors in tech is a great example. The original complaints were about actually racist working environments, the slave metaphor was just an example, and fixing that turned into lots of hot air about terminology which is much less obviously offensive, all instances of the word 'master' which is a polysemic word that doesn't necessarily relate to slavery, all instances of the word 'black' to mean something negative. It kind of is busywork and a distraction, but who gets blamed for causing that distraction? The people who want to experience less racism in tech, not the useless meddling white people who put effort into fixing superficial things instead of real problems.

I mostly agree with your analysis here but I think there are potential problems with the approach outlined. If the debate is a really good way of finding problems in the community, actually, bad actors have probably been abusive to marginalized developers for a while, and maybe the debate makes white people notice them, but they didn't appear out of nowhere trying to foment culture war.

And having noticed these bad actors, fine, you need to work around, ignore, or eject them, and I know you personally have put effort into removing bigoted jerks from your tech communities. But this creates a secondary problem where the removed people can complain loudly about how they were kicked out merely for referring to the 'master' branch instead of the more PC 'primary' branch. And lots of well-meaning people who don't know the background will take their side. Look what happened with Eich at Mozilla, for example. Lots of (basically decent) people believe he was cruelly and unjustly cancelled for merely holding the belief that same-sex marriage is anti-Biblical.

[cjwatson]

Yeah, it's very true that bad actors have probably been abusive for a while. To be clear, I meant this more as "slightly useful thing that can be salvaged" rather than "actual constructive approach to removing bigots from communities from first principles".

Eich at Mozilla is a great example of where I agree this has basically gone badly in terms of how well-meaning bystanders see it. For online communities like this it seems to depend very much on how presentable the offender manages to make themselves: Eich is a business type who's good at otherwise sounding reasonable. By contrast the person we kicked out of Debian a while back is still complaining loudly about dark conspiracies, but we instituted moderation of the mailing lists he was abusing, and he's clearly enough off the rails that as far as I can tell he's universally shunned even by well-meaning bystanders. I'm not sure how far you have to go in the latter direction to cancel out the secondary problem you mention.

[ewt]

...I'm glad to have entirely missed the Last Night of the Proms debacle. I've been vaguely uncomfortable with both of those classics for a while (though less so with Land of Hope and Glory because instrumental versions are frequently used in North America for high school graduations, of all things), but the debate sounds pretty cringeworthy.

[liv]

The debate is totally cringeworthy because it's about something that was never proposed. Maybe we should in fact be looking into less colonialist rousing anthems. But there are no woke cancellers coming for our beloved classics, it's just not a thing. You get racists ranting about it, you get serious-sounding commentators writing think-pieces about censorship, you get politicians making Statements, and it's all based on a total fiction. It's really bugging me. I mean, the Nazis would've found another excuse, but I'm finding it hard that lots of my supposed allies are taking their side, because they think the LNotP traditions aren't harming anyone so shouldn't be banned.

[oursin]

And the thing with those statues etc that got torn down, or new plaques stating their horrendous history rather than saying what Great Men they were, was that people had been saying for years that this should be done, and finally it was.

At Academic Institution with which I am honorarily associated, the issue with the naming of lecture-theatres and seminar rooms after figures associated with A Certain Pseudo-Science which is not, perhaps dead and discredited enough, alas, has been muttering on for years, with some people even refusing to teach in the rooms in question. The names were finally removed this spring. (Though this does not obviate some ongoing related more contemporary issues.)

[liv]

Yes, people have been objecting to egregiously racist memorials for years, it's not a new thing caused by protests against police violence, or Young People These Days being snowflakes who can't tolerate any dissenting views. And objecting to egregiously racist stuff doesn't mean a wave of iconoclasm where everything from the past has to be destroyed. My employer renamed a bunch of stuff from Watson room to McClintock room, which I must admit I approve of. (Franklin already had a place.)

[cesy]

Thank you for expressing this so clearly - I've seen the same trend in a few places, and wish I knew a good way to refocus the conversation on the bigger issues.

[silveradept]

As someone in an organization who is theoretically going to attempt some of the more difficult changes (once the committee that is formed to go through the selected protocol tells us where we need to work on things most) with the assistance of outside help (once the committee that is in charge of determining what the request for qualifications comes up with what we are looking for in a consultant), there's also something in there that I'm seeing about diversion from the difficult work to something that seems easier, would require less effort, and doesn't actually fix the problem about the sheer amount of bureaucracy that gets brought to bear on any suggestion that might require change, even the simple stuff like making language changes. The distractions that could be solved with "okay, so we're changing our official terms because they have unintended consequences, let's move on to this more substantive thing" instead become two committee studies, three recommendations, and a formal vote that takes two years to do and gives more than enough space and time for the Nazis to complain about how they're the ones being persecuted for innocent language choices and for people who want actual substantive work to give up or not start because the simple things are taking so long and getting so bogged down and aren't actually going to be helpful anyway. (But they have to wait until that gets done because there's not enough organizational capacity to walk and chew gum at the same time, because the organization itself and its senior management aren't really interested in doing something that might be hard or expensive when there's this seemingly easy, cheap, and supposedly related thing that can be done instead.)

[ephemera]

This post and this article came up for me close together - not sure if you're directly in relation, but - yes.

Also, hi!

[switterbeet]

Thank you for articulating this so clearly. Do you know if there is a name for this phenomenon?