Language Doesn't Matter Nearly As Much As People Think It Does
Changing the jargon is a highly overrated means of social change
In the 1980’s and 1990’s, there was a movement among some civil rights leaders (most notably Jesse Jackson) to replace “black” (which was then typed with lower case) with “African American”. The activists argued that by shifting the focus from skin color to ancestry, this would make more clear their point that racists were wrong and that humans are not defined by their skin color.
It didn’t take. We do sometimes use “African American”, but the preferred term is still “Black” (now with a capital “B”). It turned out that Black Americans themselves like “Black”, and the rest of America, quite correctly, tends to defer to what a group calls itself.
The most important thing about that episode is that, in fact, whether the group calls itself “African American” or “Black” has nothing to do with civil rights, ending racism, or anything else. It is just a label. Changing the label to “African Americans” would not have convinced any police officer to stop pulling people over because of their race, would not have integrated any city dealing with the legacy of segregated housing, and would not have improved any urban schools. Meanwhile, the decision to stay with “Black” did not cause the sky to fall for Black Americans either.
Activists love labels. I can think of several reasons this is true. Probably the biggest driver is this- it is easier to change language than to compromise on policy. Every political movement that is not winning on an issue it cares about defines the issue as a communications problem, because it’s comforting to believe that all you have to do is change your messaging and you don’t have to do any of the dirty business of compromising or trimming your ideological sails. You can actually see this very much on the right, where Frank Luntz has told Republicans for years to say things like “death tax” instead of “estate tax”. This comforts them when they see polls showing that tax cuts for rich people aren’t popular- all we have to do is message it right!
Similar to this point is the fact that labels can make it look like you are doing something. For instance, while much has been written about “intersectionality” (mostly by people who have no idea what Kimberle Crenshaw’s original paper on the subject actually argued), actually getting different interest groups in a coalition onto the same page is difficult. Whereas inclusive language is not. So “minorities” became “people of color” (the banal point that these groups are less than 50 percent of the population was taken by activists as a signal that they were “less” than the majority), which in turn has become “BIPOC” (because Black people and American Indians face special hardships and discrimination and need to be “centered” in the designation).
The reality, of course, is that there are huge tensions between different minority groups (e.g., between Blacks and Asians) and it’s much easier to come up with an acronym everyone agrees on than it is to actually get disparate groups of people on board with a common platform.
Finally, there is the issue of jargon. I can’t pinpoint the aspect of human psychology or evolution that causes us to love feeling like insiders speaking the lingo, but we certainly do love it. Lawyers love their Latin, doctors love to use six syllable words to describe common health conditions, even football fans are proud that they know what it means when the defense shifts into a cover-2. Using all the latest terms is how you show that you are in the in-crowd, and thus there seems to be new terminology every year and terms from even five years ago are sometimes obsolete or no longer preferred.
For instance, I am old enough to remember when even gay rights activists used the term “homosexual” freely. Eventually, that changed, probably to some extent because homophobes used the first two syllables of the word as a slur. So then we got “gay”. And to be clear, at first, “gay” was an umbrella term, the same way “trans” or “BIPOC” is now. “Gays”, back then, included gay men, lesbian women, and bisexual people, as well as some parts of what we now call the trans umbrella, such as cross-dressers and drag queens. “Gay” is also a demonstration that not all linguistic changes are terrible- “gay” really was a far superior term than “homosexual”, not only because it wasn’t used as a slur, but also simply because it was one syllable and easy to say, and had a subtle piece of messaging that gay people- who were still thought of at the time by many people as having some sort of disorder- were, in fact, happy with their sexuality.
But eventually, lesbian activists wanted to be identified separately, so we went to “gay and lesbian”. Interestingly, the use of “gay” to denote lesbians never really went away- for instance, Ellen Degeneres came out on her show by saying “I’m gay”, not “I’m a lesbian”. Plenty of lesbians still self describe as gay. But the movement said “gays and lesbians”.
The next step came when people decided it was important to separate out bisexual people and include trans people specifically. So we got “GLBT”. And then, in the late 1990’s or early 2000’s, it was decided that lesbians had to go before gay people for some reason, so it became “LGBT”. (I was at an academic function in 2006 and remember being corrected by a professor when I said “GLBT” rather than “LGBT”.) And, of course, now we have LGBTQIA, an acronym I have discussed before.
The point of this history is that when the changes come so fast, to the point where a lot of people can’t keep track of all the initials in the acronym anymore, clearly public persuasion is no longer even a theoretical goal. Nor can mediating the differences among the different communities fully explain it- after all, as I pointed out, a lot of lesbians were perfectly fine with “gay” and still are. What’s going on is that the jargon is changing so fast that only the most plugged-in people can keep track of it, and thus the use of the latest jargon signals that you are part of the in-group.
And when we get to this point, we’ve lost the thread. Adding additional initials isn’t going to improve anyone’s lives. Indeed, there were advocates for intersex people, doing great work, long before anyone thought to put the “I” into the acronym.
In the end, we really need to stop worrying so much about language. Much of the great work on Black civil rights was performed at the time when the legendary civil rights activists and advocates used the term “Negro” to designate Black people. Thurgood Marshall used it, as did Martin Luther King, Jr. We’d never use it now, but somehow great progress was made despite such an archaic term being in common currency. Indeed, I like to think that one reason such great progress was made was that those great men weren’t hung up on language, because it got in the way of making their pressing moral claims to the American public.