“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” — George Orwell
One of the many things I loved about the Black Lives Matter movement is that it spurred a renewed call to recognize that words matter, particularly in the struggle for racial justice. It pushed many writers, including myself, to become more conscious and considerate of how language can be used to drive or resist social transformation. For years, organizations and writers, critical of racist tropes and signifiers, have been advocating for the use of more humanizing language to describe and define people, places, and situations.
They persist even in the face of white supremacist rumblings against “political correctness” and despite the demonization of Critical Race Theory.
This awareness has implications for the ways we narrowly define young people as “at risk” or in our use of the language of deficit to describe Black and Latino communities as,“dangerous neighborhoods,” “high-crime areas,” or any such combination of deficit plus geography. It’s a language that’s used to conceal systemic oppression, segregation, disinvestment, physical destruction, and economic isolation.
Such language, used by liberals and conservatives alike, reduces peoples and their communities, schools, and enterprises to deficits while ignoring or undervaluing their beauty, culture, traditions, and history of accomplishments and social movements.
Case in point —
Yesterday, NPR ran a story about the election of Michelle Wu as the first woman and first person of color ever elected mayor of Boston. It was a straight news article but still was filled with the kind of hidden signifiers I refer to above.
NPR is by no means a tool of the Trumpies, like say, Fox News. If anything, its bent is usually toward the liberal center. But in this piece, the writer falls back on the corrupted language of the right to describe Wu in a patronizing fashion. She’s mayor because she’s the “darling of the progressive wing of the party. “Darling” as an obvious pejorative.
They go on to describe Tuesday’s election this way:
The contest between the two candidates marked a turning point in Boston politics, which has a history of fraught racial tensions and forced desegregation.
The terms “racial tension”, “racially-charged”, and “racial unrest” are among some of those vapid, neutral catch-phrases that mask the problem of racism and its purveyors. They ought to be ditched by serious writers.
As for “forced desegregation,” it is anything but neutral. After all, who is desegregation being “forced” upon? Certainly not the victims of racial segregation, who had that evil system “forced” upon them.
The implication is that the government’s enforcement of civil rights laws to desegreg…ate public schools and facilities is somehow an imposition or an infringement on the rights of the oppressors.
It’s the kind of language that’s currently being used in the Fox Newsroom to attack vaccine mandates or the teaching of history and science in our schools.
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