A Word About Words

It starts with words.

One of my guests on the “Higher Callings” podcast was a long-time friend from Ghana, a black man who came to the U.S. in the 1980s, became an associate pastor in a predominantly white protestant church in suburban Boston, and chaired the Africana Studies department of a prestigious college. He learned of a group of poorly treated African descendants living in India, many of whose ancestors had been brought there as enslaved people, and he worked with Catholic sisters on the ground to help the children receive an education and all the people to meet their basic needs.

When I asked him about the ancestors of the people he had found, I referred to them as “slaves,” the term I had grown up with. He was too polite to correct me, but in his answer he called them “enslaved people.” I puzzled silently about why we were using two different terms to refer to the same phenomenon, but gradually came to understand that, at least in this conversation, “enslaved people” had become the preferred nomenclature.

This week, I read a proposed resolution that would urge legal authorities to avoid the use of dehumanizing language in the criminal justice system. The main example given was the word “offender” to refer to a person convicted of breaking the law. Rather than call people “offenders,” the proposal suggests, we could find words that de-emphasize their wrongful conduct and honor their personhood.

Another variation on this theme, I suppose, is our use of the word “migrants” to describe foreign nationals attempting to enter the United States to escape poverty and oppression. Isn’t it easier to exclude “migrants” than it would be to exclude “families seeking refuge from life-threatening conditions”?

Florida seems headed in the opposite direction. Its governor, with support from its Republican-controlled legislature, wants to limit the vocabulary that may be used in Florida’s schools. We’ve all heard of the “Don’t Say Gay” law. More recently, the state rejected an AP course in African-American history. Teachers are not allowed to teach what has been loosely labeled (and poorly understood) as “Critical Race Theory,” or about trans rights. Alarming numbers of books have been banned from school libraries. The governor has declared open warfare on “Woke” culture. He uses that word to stigmatize everything that smacks of openness to informed and inclusive perspectives.

The battle is not only about words, but about direction. It is a contest between a racist and homophobic past versus a more equitable and inclusive future. For years, progressives have placed their hope in Dr. King’s reminder that the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice. Today, their opponents seek to bend it back in the other direction. Words are their first weapon in this clash of cultures.

As a simple matter of justice, American society should be allowed to evolve in ways that eliminate the still-extant, dehumanizing tendencies of our past, including those tendencies that brought African people to our shores against their will, kept them in bondage for more than two centuries, and continued to deny them the same rights that European-Americans enjoyed after the physical chains were taken away. For that to happen, our language also needs to evolve in a manner that honors the humanity and innate equality of those whose ancestors were enslaved, as well as other groups that face their own forms of dehumanization. Maybe if we allowed it to do so, we could begin to disarm those who would brutalize and murder our brothers and sisters whose only “offense”is their sexual orientation or the color of their skin.

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It feels ironic for me to write a piece that encourages the evolution of our language. I’ve always been a conservative when it comes to English usage, reluctant to adopt linguistic change (one of the last, perhaps, to grudgingly accept “impact” as a substitute for the verb “affect.”) But even this curmudgeon recognizes the power of language to destroy as well as its power to build up, and am persuaded that the use of certain words in certain contexts needs to change to help build a more compassionate society.

Also, I did not intend to post this today, as my new preferred publication days are Fridays, not Sundays. But I spent much of the past few days preparing for meetings scheduled for tomorrow and launching Season 4 of my “Higher Callings” podcast. Yesterday I put the finishing touches on the first episode of the new season, an interview with a clinical professor at my law school who, along with her students, has helped to free 150 prisoners on death row in a poor African country, people who did not deserve or need to be imprisoned or executed. How easy it is for those of us in wealthier countries to take for granted the exercise of due process rights our nation’s affluence affords. (The fact that not everyone in our criminal justice system gets a fair shot is a topic for another day.) I hope you will check out my new episode where you get your podcasts.