Saturday, July 22, 2017

Can slur avoidance be taken too far?

I was rather flabberghasted to read an otherwise good post on Language Log seriously suggesting that racial slurs are so painful they should be coyly asterisked out even in careful lexicographical explanations of why they should not be used. I do not pretend to any expertise on the impact of the specific slur in question there - I'd prefer to hear more black linguists' comments on that - but much of the argument they make is general, not specific:
If you take the standard linguistic analysis of slurs, though, the word’s power does not come from mere taboo [...] The word literally has as part of its semantic content an expression of racial hate, and its history has made that content unavoidably salient. It is that content, and that history, that gives this word (and other slurs) its power over and above other taboo expressions. It is for this reason that the word is literally unutterable for many people, and why we (who are white [...]) avoid it here.

Yes, even here on Language Log. There seems to be an unfortunate attitude — even among those whose views on slurs are otherwise similar to our own — that we as linguists are somehow exceptions to the facts surrounding slurs discussed in this post. In Geoffrey Nunberg’s otherwise commendable post on July 13, for example, he continues to mention the slur (quite abundantly), despite acknowledging the hurt it can cause. We think this is a mistake. We are not special; our community includes members of oppressed groups (though not nearly enough of them), and the rest of us ought to respect and show courtesy to them.

Anglo culture has a long tradition of scrupulously avoiding certain words in order to respect and show courtesy towards, in particular, women and children - people who were thought of as weaker and more emotional than adult men, and in need of their protection. Politeness is great, but if you treat people like they're made of glass, you're not only patronizing them, you're excluding them - you're implying that there are some discussions they just can't handle. (The term "white knight" comes to mind.)

This is ironic in general - people who have made it through serious oppression tend to be pretty tough, though everyone has their vulnerabilities. It's doubly ironic within an academic context, in that a core academic skill is the ability to confront and (if necessary) rebut personally threatening arguments without getting carried away by one's immediate reactions. In order to master North African historical linguistics, I've had to read works by colonial generals and OAS terrorists who fought and killed to subjugate my ancestors, and whose attitudes often colour their work; most people working on marginalized languages will have had similar experiences. If I can deal with that, do you really expect me to be incapacitated by some professor's cautious mention of, say, the word "raghead"? Words certainly can hurt, but slurs have enough power as they stand without adding the power of absolute taboo on top.

7 comments:

David Marjanović said...

This is really about post-traumatic stress syndrome.

PTSD is a lot more common than people used to think, and for many people the experience can indeed be triggered by tiny reminders, including words. The idea here is that many people who suffer from racism in general have a racism-related personal trauma that gave them PTSD. Some definitely do; the argument is that it's common enough to justify the rather small effort of avoiding likely triggers. In the background of this are the facts that, while there are not as many people without any health insurance in the US anymore as there used to be, health insurance is still ridiculously expensive, and most of the insurers are for-profit companies who see it as their first duty to their shareholders to deny all payment for anything for as long as possible on top of the bureaucratic nightmare that the multitude of insurers already causes.

I don't have any stake or experience in this, so I'm staying out...

David Marjanović said...

...and then I got distracted before mentioning mental health in particular. Mental healthcare is apparently in a particularly bad shape in the US, not that it's really good anywhere. And then there's the usual stigma against seeking help in that area.

Lameen Souag الأمين سواق said...

OK, that seems a reasonable summary (and by all accounts US health insurance is an insane, Kafkaesque system.) Several objections come to mind - notably, what justifies the assumption that the figleaf of a few asterisks/dashes will suffice to stop the slur from triggering such sufferers of racism-generated PTSD? (And are there documented cases of the mere mentioning of a slur being enough to trigger such PTSD?) But I don't really want to go down that road. I'd rather focus on the point that concerns me most about this way of thinking about the issue: it (no doubt with the best of intentions) makes members of minority groups in academia collectively look like weak, vulnerable people whom the rest of the community has to go out of their way to avoid offending. As a member of a minority group myself, I am very much not keen to go down that road, and I don't think it's to any minority's advantage to do so, least of all in the context of American culture.

David Marjanović said...

least of all in the context of American culture.

Yeah. Have you noticed the connotations of victim there? Or indeed of loser. There's a heavy implication that everyone is in complete control of their future.

Etienne said...

1-As proof that there are sane Academic linguists left (yes, I had my doubts too) I recommend the following: Postal, Paul M. "Policing the Content of Linguistic Examples" Language: Vol. 79, No. 1 (March 2003), pp. 182-188. He argues against LSA guidelines on non-sexist language, and his arguments apply to this case just as well, I think (Be careful if you read it in a public setting, by the way: footnote 3 made me laugh quite hard).

2-This obsession with words, and (by comparison) utter indifference to reality, seems deeply rooted in the United States: I'm reminded of A-the words of Colonel Kurtz in APOCALYPSE NOW: "We train young men to drop fire on people, but their commanders won't allow them to write "fuck" on their airplanes because it's obscene!", and B-The American University I taught at, where use of a (possible)racial slur by a professor was considered a far more serious matter (if the number of articles in the University paper were any indication) than the use by the University of prison labor (mostly Black men, with mostly white guards, on a mostly white campus, of course) to clean up University grounds.

David Marjanović said...

prison labor

*headdesk*

Lameen Souag الأمين سواق said...

Etienne:

1. Reading both Postal and the article he's replying to, my main reaction was: haven't these people got anything better to do with their time? Of all the factors likely to put women off doing linguistics, I doubt gender bias in example sentences would even make it into the top 100. But I've never been quite sure about Postal's sanity ever since I flipped through "The Vastness of Natural Languages", in which he argues for the grammaticality of transfinitely long sentences...

2. Strictly speaking, that actually is slavery - but no worries, this kind of slavery is perfectly constutitional!