To understand much of our language, Gnorts would have to already be aware that our words and symbols gain meaning from how they're used, and you couldn't, for instance, determine that a swastika is offensive (in the west) by its shape alone.
In this case, the term "colored people" gained racist connotations from its history of being used for discrimination and segregation - and avoiding it for that reason is the primary principle at play. There's also the secondary/less universal principle of preferring "person-first language".
This passive phrasing implies a kind of universal consensus or collective decision-making process that the word has officially changed connotation. If this were the case, it would not be such a problem.
What happens in practice is that a small minority of people decide that a certain word has bad connotations. These people decide that it no longer matters what the previous connotation was, nor the speaker's intention in uttering it, it is now off-limits and subject to correction when used. People pressure others to conform, in varying degrees of politeness -- anything from a well-intentioned and friendly FYI to a public and aggressive dressing down -- and therefore the stigma surrounding the word spreads.
It's hard to believe that this terminology treadmill genuinely helps anyone, as people are perfectly capable of divining intent when they really want to (nobody is accusing the NAACP of favoring discrimination and segregation).
Add to this that the favored terms of the treadmill creators don't necessarily even reflect what the groups in question actually want. Indigenous Americans generally prefer being called Indian, not Native American (CGP Grey made a whole video about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kh88fVP2FWQ).
So that momentary pause you feel when you almost say "Indian" and then correct it to "Native American", who is that actually serving? It's not the people in question. It's a different set of people, a set of people who have gained the cultural power to stigmatize words based on their own personal beliefs.
Enforcing this false dilemma is what leads us to this situation. Even this CCP Grey guy is arguing for the false dilemma. Actually referring to Native Americans or Indians as a monolithic group is the problem. The many peoples forced to live in the Indian Territories(Oklahoma) have different needs than the peoples forced to live along the US-Canadian border(like Ojibway, Blackfoot, and Mohawk) and different needs than the Apache... another overloaded name[1].
You're advocating for people to be described in whatever term they prefer and not have a term imposed upon them from outside.
That alien visiting for mars would think "Oh, this is this wokeness I have heard of, respecting groups desires to be addressed in their preferred way".
But no, you're only bringing this up because you believe the people you think are "woke" are imposing a name on these groups from the outside.
Is it a principle or is it a pointless gotcha? I would argue this is aggressively performative anti-wokeness!
The principle is that language should be judged based on its intention, rather than on how it conforms the arbitrary fashion imposed by the most priggish among us (to use pg’s word).
Few of the treadmills we see are actually an organic expression of group preference. Nobody was asking for Latinx or Native American. Nobody was asking for “person experiencing houselessness.” Nobody was asking for the master branch to be renamed to main. These are activist-driven efforts masquerading as authentic priorities of the groups in question. So it goes with most of the causes generally described as woke.
In all cases we should judge speech based on its intention rather than how it conforms to shifting standards. But the fact that this language policing frequently is based on externally-invented treadmills just adds insult to injury, and exposes the vacuousness of the whole enterprise.
The issue comes when you are compelled by your company/social circle/etc. to put your own pronouns in your bio (signalling fake political allegiance), being fired for accidentally misgendering a (badly passing) trans-woman, and so on.
https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2014/05/rupaul_s-_tran...
Here in Canada it's "Indigenous peoples", sorry, I mean "First Nations", unless they've come up with something else now. Never mind that the people in question don't necessarily feel any kind of solidarity with other indigenous groups beyond their own.
(Also, "missing and murdered indigenous women (and children)" is a set phrase, and people will yell at you if you point out the statistics showing that something like 70% of missing and murdered indigenous people in Canada are men.)
They would instead have a history and culture (or many histories and many cultures) to learn in order to contextualize words and symbols and find their actual meaning, because meaning doesn't really exist without context.
We all know what's going to happen. The underlying history and culture would change within the span of 24 hours, and suddenly "colored people" would loose it's racist connotations.
Awareness of history and culture won't help you understand language rules. Instead, to avoid saying something racist, one must be keenly aware of political expediency.
This is only a tiny part of the reason.
The main reason is that fact-checking works so well against the right, and has almost no benefit for the right.
Why?
Because almost everything the right says is a lie of one kind or another, but almost everything the left says is either mostly or wholly grounded in fact.
So “fact checking” is an almost useless tool for the right, since it rarely ever contradicts what the left says. And yet, the right can get very severely corrected by fact-checkers with almost everything they say.
Musk and Zuckerberg are killing fact checking because they NEED misinformation to carry the day. Because if we truly understood how badly the Parasite Class were bleeding the Working Class dry just for a few extra thousandths of a percentage point of wealth accumulation, we would all rise up and bring out the guillotines to dispose of them once and for all.
Misinformation is the way they control the working class.
I am not “right wing” by any definition but this is naive and bubbled to the point of ridiculousness. Very little political discourse on social media is grounded in fact regardless of the ideologies involved. Layman discussion based on headlines and vibes has no place in serious politics and the real danger of these platforms is that they’ve elevated that to the standard
Presumably you liked the fact checkers before because they were of the same political persuasion as you. Now that Trump is in power would you prefer if Musk/Zuckerberg placed right wing fact checkers in place and punished any opinion which is outside of the platform's Overton window?
Musk removed picking fact checkers and replaced them with community notes. Zuckerberg says he'll do the same. Isn't that the societal accountability that you want?
Of course, if your worldview is sufficiently different from mine, we will disagree on what is true. But lying is lying.
Or perhaps the GP liked the fact checkers because they were on the whole doing a good job of actually checking facts.
I don't know if that's true or not; I haven't been on social media in years. But it's an incredibly weak argument to assume that someone only likes something because it aligns with their politics.
but yeah, its definitely the fact checking that people are most upset about
One of the strongest impressions I had were that there were TK-count principle topics in the story:
- The psychological impacts of an ever-increasing rate of change and information flow. Largely a dark view of the future, and one that's borne out pretty well.
- Specific technological inventions or trends. Most of these have massively under-performed, with the obvious exception of information technologies, though how that's ultimately manifested is also strongly different from what was foreseen / predicted.
- Social changes. Many of these read as laughably trite ... until I realised how absolutely profound those changes had been. The world of 1970 and of 2020 are remarkably different in gender roles, acceptance of nontraditional sexual orientations, race relations, even relationships of the young and old. I'm not saying "perfect" or "better" or "worse", or even that FS is an especially good treatment of the topic, only that the situation is different. Moreso than the other categories, the book marks a boundary of sorts between and old and new world. We live in the new world, and the old one is all but unrecognisable.
(Those in their 70s or older may well have a more visceral feel of this as they'd lived through that change as adults, though they're rapidly dying out.)
Like the paragraph quoted above: it's just so blatantly obvious what's wrong with turns like "considered particularly enlightened", or "there are no underlying principles" that I find it hard to believe that the text as a whole sounds so friendly and convincing, unless you stop and think for a second.
I wish I could write like this about whatever mush is in my head.
> So yesterday I gave my lecture. Despite a lack of preparation, I spoke quite well and without any hesitation, which I ascribe to the cocaine I had taken beforehand. I told about my discoveries in brain anatomy, all very difficult things that the audience certainly didn’t understand, but all that matters is that they get the impression that I understand it.
Maybe pg has the same strategy. Certainly reads that way.
[1] https://www.truthorfiction.com/sigmund-freud-i-ascribe-to-th...
It frees me from giving a shit if I'm using e.g. rhetorical tricks in place of good-faith argument. Of course the argument's obviously bad, if you're any good at spotting bad arguments! So are all the others I've seen or heard supporting it. That's why I picked it—it's bad.
I can usually argue positions I disagree with far more persuasively and fluently than ones I agree with, because I'm not concerned with being correct or making it look bad to smart people, nor making myself look dumb for making a bad argument (the entire thing is an exercise in making bad arguments, there's no chance of a good one coming out). Might try that. It's kinda a fun, and/or horrifying, exercise. Drag out those slanted and context-free stats, those you-know-to-be-disproven-or-commonly-misrepesented anecdotes and studies, (mis-)define terms as something obviously bad and proceed to tear them apart in a "surely we can all agree..." way (ahem), overgeneralize the results of that already-shaky maneuver (ahem), misrepresent history in silly ways (ahem), and so on. Just cut loose. No worries about looking foolish because you already think the position's foolish.
Similarly, Graham almost certainly already has strong opinions on the basic premises of this essay. Thus, the process of revising and polishing his essay to make it readable and compelling doesn't help him spot any of these obvious critiques. As you quoted, he believes the people advocating "people of color" over other terms have no principles. Thus he can't apply their principles to his own essay and anticipate their criticisms. Based on how he describes "wokeness," he seems to think are generally unprincipled.
Neither he nor his reviewers are equipped to analyze the substance, which is why it can be stylistically strong but substantially weak.
On this flip side, my least favorite are when someone name drops thinkers as a way to reference an ideology. It's very hard to actually know if someone understands the ideas behind that name, so it's usually impossible to understand why they think something.
And, the names they drop often were the types to present their thoughts as the first, rarely, if ever, dropping names themselves, which I always find an amusing "they were allowed be free thinkers, but you can't!"
Of course the humanities are all usurped by the woke elites and you should look only to PG and his friends for guidance.
No, you are just giving them the power to actually do stuff without looking like they are doing stuff.
As long as they talk the talk, they don't have to walk the walk. You don''t have to actually care about issues, that's what the DEI department is for.
But OPs point is broader: if you allow the bad people to just appropriate the symbol as their own, they're going to gradually take over everything. Never mind swastikas; we're at the point where making an okay sign can be misconstrued as a white nationalist gesture, and people self-censor themselves accordingly.
There's also the reverse problem here, where, if you tie such things so strongly to symbols in popular opinion, then loud condemnation of such symbols is used to "prove" that one is not a bad person. For a major ongoing example of this look at Russia with its cult of "we defeated the Nazis therefore we're definitely the good guys".
At the end of the day, it's really just a lazy shortcut. The bad people are bad because of their ideas and actions, not because of their symbols. If we always look at the ideas and actions, the symbols are irrelevant, and we don't have to surrender them to the bad guys' claims.
Switching to another word isn't ceding power to the bad people. It's taking away their power to redefine things. It's letting them have the now-useless word exclusively, which will become associated with their speech, and not the original meaning. The original meaning is reclaimed by using a new not-yet-soiled word for it, and the cycle continues.
* had everyone declare their pronouns
* advertised their segregated black-only event next month
* repeatedly interrupted to chant "trans rights!"
This is a very common cluster of behavior, and I'm not sure what I would call it other than "woke". If there's another word that would be better, I'm all ears. But my experience has been that proponents don't find any word acceptable, because what they object to is the very idea that this is a distinct cluster of behavior. They feel, as the source article says, that each of my bullet points is just an independent matter of respect.
It only works because we're in a society of judging people the moment we see them. Mimicking the language of "bad people" will get that association. I don't think we'll ever truly "fix" that.
I politely asked for a fact-check on it in the comments section, as I otherwise enjoyed and agreed with the substance of the post. He both removed the claim in question and my comment.
I was unsure of how to feel about this. Those who had already read the post online or still had the original in their inbox were left with the misinformation from what they may consider a trusted source.
I believed it would have been better to edit out the false information, leave my comment, and reply with clarification on the editing and why.
Likewise, this practice of dynamically-edited online content is actually relevant to the topic of PG's post and the role it plays in replacing the traditional constraints on printed media.
(some strong language and racist words used so maybe not safe for work or around kids)
A person who actively discriminates in hiring against black people but doesn't call anyone a slur is seen as more virtuous as someone who doesn't discriminate, yet uses the slur in jest. The first behavior is seen as more excusable than the second, although an actual reasonable moral judgement makes it evident it's not.
What in the world are you talking about?
I am not surprised at all that Graham is both of those things.
In terms of racism, its different but the same mechanism. Being compared to a minority race is not an insult (to most people). Its the fact, that racist people will use the word with vitriol. Racists and those they argue with will use the term in their arguments and gradually the use of the term will gain the conotation of a racist person. Hence, Negro -> Colored -> Person of Color -> <the next thing when PoC becomes racist>
Mongoloid, Retard, Special, individuals with learning disabilities are not entirely interchangeable (except as insults).
In the same way "colored people" can gain these connotations, just from other few people (falsely or not) inferring that it has those connotations. There need not be a history. I've seen too many blowups over the years about the word niggardly to think otherwise (more than one of these has made national news in the last few decades).
It's not that there is a history of discrimination, it's that we've all made a public sport out of demonstrating how not-racist we are, and people are constantly trying to invent new strategies to qualify for the world championships.
> It's not that there is a history of discrimination
In abstract theory, that would be possible.
In concrete reality, with "colored people", there is, in fact, a history of discrimination, and when the context of use is not such that there is a clear separation from that history (a separation that exists in, e.g., the NAACP continuing to use "colored people" in its name) it has become problematic because of that history.
Such is claimed. Which are the false accusations, which are the legitimate accusations, and which are merely the mistaken accusations? And how are each of those quantified? If someone actually tells me the numbers, how do I know that those are the correct numbers? And why should I believe them? Is there a reason to believe those, other than trying to qualify for the world championship "I am not a racist" games? If my skepticism is also racism, I then lack the means to be and remain rational about the subject, and if I can't be rational about it then I am with 100% certainty being manipulated with regards to the subject.
Are you allowed to be skeptical? Do you feel as if you're allowed to be skeptical? If you do feel as if you are allowed to be skeptical, why are you not?
Then the dominant culture that was responsible for a lot of that injustice latched on to it and twisted its meaning, watering it down.
This is known as political recuperation - when radical ideas and terminology gets sanitized and deradicalized. It isnt some conspiracy either. It happens naturally, especially in America.
Just today I merged to the main branch instead of a master branch. This happened because Microsoft employees wanted to pressure Microsoft to prevent sales to ICE-the-concentration-camp-people and Microsoft wanted to throw them a bone by "avoiding the term master" while still making that sweet sale.
Rename that branch and everybody is happy, in theory right? Everybody except the people in those concentration camps, I guess.
The people in Silly valley with masters degrees and scrum master certificates can laugh and pat themselves on the back about all of this silliness, imagining that "wokeness" became stupid because of Marxism or something, rather than because of societal pressures (like the ever present profit motive) which they actually deeply approve of.
Phil Ochs
Btw your assessment could not be further from the truth. I've never met anyone who was more interested in learning or more intellectually curious than pg is.
they’re not colored, they’re African-American
they’re not African-American, they’re black
they’re not black, they’re Black
they’re not Black, they’re People of Color
they’re not People of Color, they’re BIPOC
I wonder what the next twist of the pretzel will look like
Not all people who are black are African American.
Not all people of color are black.
I know it sucks to keep up with things, but what sucks even works is not keeping up, and finding you and the neo nazis using the same language to mean different things. If you care, then you put the work in. That’s all anyone can do.
You should try the better thing of actually considering the history of each of these.
I won't deny that it can be annoying, but considering the specific why of each one is important. Necessary even.
I'm well-aware that I'm being rather evasive and I certainly don't think anyone is fooled by what I'm really saying.
African American was a term used around return-to-africa movements and was always heavily associated with non-americanness.
> they’re not black, they’re Black
Somebody has never heard of proper nouns
> they’re not Black, they’re People of Color
Yes... nobody ever called indigenous people negroes. It's not the same thing as black. People use the phrase to talk about more than just black people.
> they’re not People of Color, they’re BIPOC
The I stands for indigenous.
Wild quote though. Does PG self censor when using the N word? Or does he say it, with the hard r?
If that word isn't part of his vocabulary, why not? Seems like it should be.
I don't get the comparison. Hard "R" or not makes little difference. You're eligible to be canceled for using either form. So not like PoC/CP.
Should have told that to that teacher from decades ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vz9Zy2-C_lY
Such a wild interview that Boondocks outright sampled it for an episode.
