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

[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.)