The words [Equity-language] guides recommend or reject are sometimes exactly the same, justified in nearly identical language.
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Although the guides refer to language “evolving,” these changes are a revolution from above. They haven’t emerged organically from the shifting linguistic habits of large numbers of people.
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Prison does not become a less brutal place by calling someone locked up in one a person experiencing the criminal-justice system.
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The whole tendency of equity language is to blur the contours of hard, often unpleasant facts. This aversion to reality is its main appeal. Once you acquire the vocabulary, it’s actually easier to say people with limited financial resources than the poor.
This misses the point of equity language. The goal of equity language is to avoid using language that feeds people’s preconceptions and biases. Like prisoners are a subset of people who are experiencing the criminal-justice system, but the idea is that there is far more to the experience than just being in prison.
Not to mention most people have preconceived notions about who is in prison that are based on racism and other biases.
The article seems to miss the point of the language attempting to be inclusive while also assuming the intent to to be vague.
I think a lot of equity based language ends up being unclear, but once the intent is understood the goal is a positive one. Heck, person first is a great approach because people do tend to treat people as their disability or race instead of as people.
This exactly. It’s not just about the euphemism treadmill as some people here are saying, it’s also about how the construction of the language or phrasing chosen makes you think of a person. For instance in medical documentation, "this is a 57 year old diabetic male who presents with… " just sounds and feels very dehumanizing compared to “this is a 57 year old man with a history of diabetes who presents with…” It gets across the same exact meaning, but a patient reading the first version could reasonably feel like they’re being reduced to just one thing instead of what was intended (to highlight that having diabetes is important background information for the story about the person to follow).
As for the euphemism treadmill aspects, we’ll never outrun that; language and meanings are always changing, and we can’t pretend it doesn’t. We’ll always need to be changing our language with time as language itself evolves if we want to have the same or similar meanings as before.
It’s certainly better to use language that affirms people’s humanity, but if a doctor were to use the first statement to describe me, my first thought wouldn’t be “my doctor didn’t use the right words, he must not see me as a human”.
And that’s where the disconnect is. There should be nothing wrong with describing a man who is diabetic as a “diabetic male”. It’s is accurate, and to the point. It is reductive, perhaps, but how is dehumanizing to describe someone as “male”? And describing someone as “diabetic” is perfectly fine as well if they are, in fact, diabetic and that plays a role in why they are seeing the doctor in the first place. Of course, their entire life is not defined by their diabetes, but their current medical visit may be.
Does every interaction have to be an affirmation of everyone’s life story? Or is it possible that, sometimes, being reductive is exactly what is called for, and we shouldn’t assume the worst in every interaction.
Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar.
Being reductive can have disadvantages though, if you’re thinking of someone as “a diabetic” it can lead to cognitive traps and premature closure on diagonoses that may make someone miss important additional information or considerations. Medical records are also now immediately shared with patients, for better or worse, and it can sometimes be a shock to read. It may not be true for you, but many people can get a negative view of how they think their doctor must see them if the language in the notes isn’t careful, and it may harm a working physician-patient relationship. How people’s identities and diagnoses interact is complex to say the least, and can vary a lot between people.
I don’t think every interaction needs to be an affirmation of a life story or something elaborate, but I think there are times when it can be easy to lose the humanity in a situation with bad results. A little cognitive reminder can be a helpful piece in dehumanizing places like the medical system (especially in the medical system, in which most health care providers are striving not to be dehumanizing against a heavy current in that direction).
By a doctor, I very much want to be seen strictly as the biological organism that they have spent their life studying. The fact that there are very few doctors, and every person born on this earth will be a patient, means that a standard for unvarnished and concise language is morally praiseworthy in terms of its service of the greater good.
I guess my feeling is, there’s no good reason to get offended by the standard of language that the medical system operates in. There is an ocean of ill people who need help, and we’re not all special, in that sense.
A doctor who is led into a cognitive trap by seeing “diabetic” on a chart, is a bad doctor. I’m not sure small refinements of language are the remedy for that doctor’s deficits.
As for the euphemism treadmill aspects, we’ll never outrun that; language and meanings are always changing, and we can’t pretend it doesn’t. We’ll always need to be changing our language with time as language itself evolves if we want to have the same or similar meanings as before.
Yes, but as the author points out.
Although the guides refer to language “evolving,” these changes are a revolution from above. They haven’t emerged organically from the shifting linguistic habits of large numbers of people.
Something has changed recently where the language change has been too top down, and seemingly more about creating pleasant sounding euphemisms that either mean the same thing or obfuscate the meaning to make the term less useful.
I’m in agreement with you there, it shouldn’t be something to obfuscate the meaning. It should be about being more precise with your meaning if anything, about being more aware of what your word or phrasing choice may imply. But there’s always going to have to be change or people will end up saying things they didn’t mean if they refuse to acknowledge a word has changed over time or if different words may carry different meanings for different people.
I’m skeptical of the author’s argument that this is some new phenomena though. I’m also skeptical of the idea that if you’re being more careful and precise in your language it means you’re just doing it to ignore real problems. Not saying no one has ever done that before. But our brains think with language, so the language we use matters and affects ourselves as much as others, in my opinion. It’s not something that should be used in place of fixing problems, but something that could potentially help people think in that direction.
I think the new phenomenon is discussed:
Equity-language guides are proliferating among some of the country’s leading institutions, particularly nonprofits. The American Cancer Society has one. So do the American Heart Association, the American Psychological Association, the American Medical Association, the National Recreation and Park Association, the Columbia University School of Professional Studies, and the University of Washington. The words these guides recommend or reject are sometimes exactly the same, justified in nearly identical language. This is because most of the guides draw on the same sources from activist organizations: A Progressive’s Style Guide, the Racial Equity Tools glossary, and a couple of others. The guides also cite one another.
It’s calling out that a handful of sources that are cited in profession specific style guides that have referential loops, and are managed by a small portion of people. Based on the names, of these sources, is the activist nature appropriate for general style guides, or is it a dangerous tool of politicization of language? I identify as a leftist and progressive, but I don’t think partisan orgs with this much influence and questionable methodology should set standards. The Progressive’s Style Guide links websites like this as sources ( which is basically one journalist’s opinion blog post): https://grist.org/climate-energy/how-to-write-about-climate-pull-up-a-barstool/
Or this table from the source. How is “genderfuck” a professionally acceptable term, but “sexual preference” a taboo. Or slut or slut shaming is allowed, but only in certain context? Or we can’t talk about metaphors of spirit animal since that is appropriation, but for gender two spirit is okay to appropriate? How does a lay person navigate this minefield of discourse without a masters degree and staying up on style guide updates?
Or this page on discussing Israel. Personal politics aside, this style guide has an obvious political agenda, right?
This, decades-ago, was written by Douglas Hofstadter ( who also wrote “Godel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid” ) in order to break our unconsciousness about the prejudice in “Mr.”, “Miss”, and “Mrs.”: he remapped them from sex to race…
https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html
I’d say it’s neither ~black nor white~, wrong nor right, nor is it some infinitely-grey-undecideable thing.
There definitely is prejudice in our language, and it definitely reinforces the network of already-experienced-prejudices in one who is subject to it.
I changed my name to get away from all the abuse tangled into my original name.
That was required.
Having one’s own unconscious block/obstruct one’s potential for healing, because of abuse-reinforcement is a real fact of life, for many.
I don’t disagree that language needs to evolve and change. But I don’t know that swapping the words does anything to change the unconscious bias. I think a racist is still racist regardless of the language they use being explicitly about race, using coded words like “urban” or some other euphemism, etc. On the other hand I think someone’s white grandmother that donates to orgs like the ACLU or NAACP says something like “we need to do more to assist colored kids get into college, have more opportunity…” is using antiquated language, but working in the right direction of positive social change.
The problem is really that you’re just putting a new coat of paint on things, you’re not actually solving the problem. This isn’t even a new idea, it has a long history where some term gets a negative connotation, usually for a variety of reasons only some of which are discriminatory, so someone comes up with a new term that everyone switches to using, but then those same negative connotations just migrate to that new term as well.
Look how many old historical terms there are for things with negative connotations. You’ve got unhoused, homeless, vagrant, bum, itinerant, drifter, wretch, tramp, hobo, beggar, vagabond, pauper, transient, urchin, panhandler, indigent, waif, ragamuffin, shirker, and that’s just for various ways to refer to a homeless person. You can repeat this exercise for pretty much anything else.
Instead of coming up with a new name that itself will be considered discriminatory in another decade, maybe we should spend the effort trying to stop people being discriminated against and improving peoples lives. Instead of trying to protect the feelings of homeless people, maybe we should be trying to make sure they actually have homes and are taken care of.
Now, all this is of course not talking about slurs, that is derogatory slang terms for some ethnic group that are intended to convey negative connotations. Those should rightfully not be tolerated.
That is the euphemism treadmill which is about changing a label for a specific thing/concept without actually changing what is being talked about. Switching from black to African-American is an example ofnthe treadmill. People of color, which also includes other non-white people is equity language because it is more inclusive and person first.
This is about trying to change the framing of discussions and labels to be more inclusive.
Yeah, and we switch back to black because not all black people are African American.
It is more complicated than picking a single label.
The original purpose of the term African American was to make a label for the descendants of black slaves that was more precise than ‘black’ because the distinction was relevant in the context of US society. As with any term, it eventually became less useful as people who didn’t understand the purpose used it to refer to more recent voluntary immigrants who also fall in the social category of black.
Person of color is similar, as some people prefer the more precise label of black. But ‘colored person’ is right out for general use because of how it is used by racists to point out the person’s skin color in place of them being a person. The NAACP is the exception since the group itself has retained the acronym and have essentially reclaimed the term in the context of their association’s name.
Ultimately the most important thing is to avoid the labels unless they are relevant and always put the person first before the label.
I think a lot of equity based language ends up being unclear, but once the intent is understood the goal is a positive one.
Okay, but it is actually doing anything? Do people with negative biases (i.e. the people who need the most convincing) respond positively to this type of language? I really can’t imagine that they would. Especially when you admit that it ends up unclear. Are you actually helping people in prison when you refer to them as “experiencing the criminal-justice system” or is it like the article says:
[belonging] to a fractured culture in which symbolic gestures are preferable to concrete actions
Furthermore, why should this drain the positivity from existing language? “Experiencing the criminal-justice system” does draw focus to the fact of the wider experience, but that’s not always what you need or want to express. If you’re focusing on people who have been wrongfully convicted then shouldn’t go with “wrongfully imprisoned” since it’s a more power phrasing? I don’t see how milquetoast corporate-speak like “experiencing the criminal-justice system due to systemic bias” does anything aside from protecting those biases by making them sound unworthy of outrage.
I think equity language is well intended but won’t be successful because complex topics require discussion and understanding that most people don’t want to spend the time on.
[belonging] to a fractured culture in which symbolic gestures are preferable to concrete actions
There is no “culture where symbolic gestures are preferable to concrete actions”. Every single person carefully framing their speech about the criminal justice system wants prisons to be better and prosecution and punishment to be more fair.
That’s just the author doing the boring old trick of pretending activists only care about perception so they can disregard the entire message. “Oh, you say you’re a climate activist, then you should have spend the $2.41 on planting trees rather than buying sign materials made by cutting down trees! And standing in the road making me idle in my car means you’re only interested in symbolic gestures, not cutting fossil fuel usage!” In the 90s he’d be complaining about PC language while explaining that when they say “f*g” it’s just habit and they’re not intending it in a negative way so get off their case already.
So if a criminal justice department adopts the style guide and language but keeps the exact same practices, that makes a difference for reform somehow?
I framed that imprecisely. The people developing/advocating for the style guides are trying to promote criminal justice. Malignant entities can adopt them as a misdirection, but they’re not part of a culture, they’re just using it as a deception. The author is complaining about the people telling them to use better language that’s a chore for them to integrate/remember, not the people adopting it to avoid accountability.
I don’t really care if the intent is good if the effect is to make people use language that’s wordy, clumsy, or vague, or to shame people for using perfectly ordinary vocabulary. I don’t believe it actually helps anyone, and it reeks of the kind of logic that says “we must do something, and this is something, so we must do this.”
“Understanding nuance is hard!”
What nuance? All I see is a bunch of obnoxious demands not backed up by any evidence that they help anyone.
Well nuance has been dead for a while now.
calling someone “the prisoner” to bias them in a courtroom is the first thing that happens in Dicken’s Tale of Two Cities. So this conversation definitely isn’t new.
The main issue I have with this sort of thing is that in going to such great lengths to avoid offense, the plain meaning of words are often ignored. We have elevated the feelings that these words conjure above their intended use, to the point where words can be
blacklistedrejected simply because someone else uses something that sounds similar in a bad context.(Humans have equated “black” with “darkness” and bad things before they were even aware that other humans came in different skin tones. That connotation existed long before some humans decided they were better than others based on their skin tone. Why does every expression involving color have to be evocative of race now? Don’t we call it a “brown bag” lunch because the bag is, literally, brown?)
“Felon” is a good example, directly cited in this article. Felon simply means one who is convicted of a Felony offense. Why do we have to qualify or sugarcoat that? By trying to avoid any baggage that has built up regarding the term over the years we are making language imprecise.
I believe that the further we go down the rabbit hole of changing the plain meaning of words to avoid offense, that only serves to give more power to people who purposely offend.
While it would be great to be able to use these words without the subtext and context, that’s not how people operate. So while your way would be ideally better, it’s also literally impossible.
When we recognize it’s impossible, because you can’t change how people think, then we ask people to change how they act instead. I.e. what words they choose.
This is the only other solution, and at least it is slightly possible, as opposed to impossible.
Wait, are you seriously arguing that it’s impossible to think of the word “brown bag” without racial subtext? I mean, the bag is literally brown. That’s it’s color. All I want to do is eat lunch.
I’m saying that there are plenty of things where context matters.
I’m also saying that I don’t always know all the context. I’m not omniscient. So if someone who DOES know tells me about the context, I learn and adjust. For example, I no longer use the phrase “gypped” to mean ripped off. I didn’t know it was a slur against the Romania, I learned, I adjusted.
Life is full of changes and it’s really not hard to make small adjustments if it lessens other people’s pain.
As for the brown bag thing, if African American leaders that I trust explain that it’s somehow offensive, I’ll look into it. They haven’t, so I haven’t.
When people are hurting from being beaten with a stick, it doesn’t help at all if it’s called the “People’s Stick”.
The People’s Elbow begs to differ.
It’s poor and analogy. You’re assuming the amount of pain is equal between two different things. It’s certainly not.
How can we be sure of this? Simple! We can test it. Go up to a black person and call them a black person. Then go up to a black person and call them a n*gger. Ask them which one felt worse.
It’s the difference between me saying “it’s a poor analogy” and “that’s just f*cking wrong”. Tone and word choice is very important.
