By
Wilfred Reilly
Friday,
January 13, 2023
Almost a
decade back, a group of buddies and I were watching a newish Robin Hood movie,
and a young mentee asked why British authorities were hanging a Caucasian
bandit: “He’s white — that ain’t realistic.”
The
story is funny, but the sincere energy underlying the question is surprisingly
common. To give an all-too-real example, academic leaders at USC recently
declared a de facto ban
on the use of the word “field” during discussions of scholarly work. Across at least the sizeable
School of Social Work, the University of Southern California/Spoiled Children
will “remove the word . . . from its curriculum and practice and replace it
with the word ‘practicum’ instead.” The apparent reason for this is the
perception that only blacks and Latinos have worked in the United States’
actual fields in the recent past: “The term may have . . . connotations for
descendants of slaves and immigrant workers.” Per a rather lengthy official
letter from the institution: “This change supports anti-racist social work
practice by replacing language that could be considered anti-Black or immigrant
in favor of inclusive language.”
The
“field” example hardly stands alone (the field behind it is crowded!). Just a
year or two back, the Grey Lady herself — the Times of New
York — noted the decision of major East Coast realty groups such as the Real
Estate Board of New York to stop using the
term “master” to
describe the largest and best-appointed bedroom in a home. In a piece titled
“The Biggest Bedroom Is No Longer a Master,” Times-woman Sydney
Franklin pointed out that the push against the language “comes in the wake of
George Floyd’s death and the resulting Black Lives Matter protests,” and quoted
Southern Star Realty agent Tanna Young to the effect that the term “master”
“evoked images of pre–Civil War plantation life.” New York City real estate
board COO Sandhya Espitia summarized the situation as: “(We are) assessing what
meaningful steps should be put in place to bring greater diversity and
inclusion to the industry.”
In
perhaps the most notable of this speech-change trend, Stanford University —
although it has pulled back a smidge after coast-to-coast
mockery and
cabbage-tossing — released a list of several dozen words that right-thinkers
are no longer to say. The roster broke down forbidden
terms into no
fewer than ten categories, including “ableist, ageism, colonialism, culturally
appropriative, gender-based, imprecise language, institutionalized racism,
person-first, violent, and additional considerations.” While a small number of
the words or phrases were potentially offensive, others included the term
“American” (this might imply that U.S. citizens think their country the best in
the whole hemisphere), “brave” (could describe either our own warriors or
indigenous opponents as “savage”), “walk-in” (implies that most people
perambulate on two legs), and even “beating a dead horse” (legitimizes violence
vs. animals).
All of
this is, again, hilarious to describe. But, as with the Robin Hood example, the
fact that many people take this sort of stuff dead seriously reveals a real and
major cultural problem in American middle-class life. Many of us have been
trained to associate universal human struggles or vices uniquely with America,
including the historical mistreatment of blacks within America. This trend is
not only ahistorical, but legitimately dangerous for national morale.
For
example, while slavery was a national disgrace between 1776 and 1865, it is
simply not true that “workin’ in the fields” has been a uniquely or primarily
black or Latino job in the historical United States. According to a major
recent book — a left-leaning one that I reviewed critically — 50 to 55 percent
of all residents of a typical white-majority
state such as
Wisconsin were free or tenant farmers as late as the 1850s. For that matter,
there are a ton of landsmen out in the fields today: The U.S.A. still contains 2,010,650 working crop and animal farm
operations, with 36 percent of these located in the notoriously pale Midwest.
And most farmers of all shades are hardly rolling in the filthy lucre. Any list
of the ten poorest counties in the U.S. is almost certain to include
hardscrabble rustic locales such as Holmes County (Miss.), Buffalo County
(S.D.), Owsley County (Ky.), Clay County (Ky.), and McCreary County (Ky.).
Similarly
— if this even needs to be said — the term “master bedroom” is not a uniquely
American one deriving from the historical practice of slavery. Slavery itself,
of course, was not a singularly American vice: It dates back to the dawn of
man, and the great Greek Aristotle gave written advice on feeding
slaves (not much) and identifying “natural” bondsmen. The Arab slave trade plagued Africa for centuries
longer than the Western-driven Atlantic slave trade and resulted in the
transshipment of perhaps 5 million more victims.
And, all
this almost aside, the word “master” as used in housing sales in the northern
U.S. never had a damned thing to do with slavery in the first place. “Master”
is also a term for a skilled craftsman able to afford — if not simply build — a
big home, and even the NYT points out that “the U.S.
Department of Housing and Urban Development determined in 1995 that ‘master
bedroom’ was not discriminatory.” So far as anyone can tell, the language
traces back to the 1926 Modern Homes catalog from Sears, Roebuck. Similarly, as
regarding Stanford’s recent cringing, one might suspect that language honoring
traits such as military prowess has existed — generally in a race-neutral
fashion — across most human societies for virtually all of time.
While we
Americans play the bizarre and sickly game of (1) trying to link everything
imaginable in our society today to conflict or oppression in our past and then
(2) blubberingly apologizing for that past, other countries with violent
histories take a different route. In rapidly modernizing Mongolia, a
130-foot-tall stainless-steel statue of the great conqueror Genghis Khan greets visitors to the capital
of Ulan Bator. South Africa boasts beautifully done monuments depicting both
the Zulu king Shaka and his rival Boer voortrekkers. A common
message associated with this sort of thing — almost verbatim from the plaques
in the South Africa case — is: “We all fought each other, then. Let’s get down
to business and improve the country, now.”
We Yanks
might not want to be quite that blunt — although I basically
do. But while working out our final national message, let’s ignore the
quivering daisies (is that offensive?) and go on saying “field,” and “master
bedroom,” and the usual terms for our countrymen, without ever giving in to
unnecessary panic and guilt.
No comments:
Post a Comment