The James Carville interview I flagged earlier touched a nerve in some quarters as - as is per usual on the internet - people rushed to get their hot takes in rather than try and understand what he's saying. However, his point about "faculty lounge speak" was made at a time when we have a significant piece of new scholarship on how using language centered on race can undermine programs designed to fight broader inequality. Matthew Yglesias took this a bit further and his take is worth a read.
There's a LOT to unpack in all these discussions, but I wanted to talk specifically about language, and Carville's central point about "faculty lounge speech."
I have an abiding hatred of jargon. To a certain degree, professional jargon can be helpful as a communications short cut. Military jargon is largely indecipherable, but it makes sense to say FOP as opposed to the longer Forward Observation Post. Same with doctors. And to a degree, the same with academics, as long as they are talking to other academics.
Once you try and jump to the broader population, these complicated, unwieldy, un-euphonious neologisms fall flat. Interestingly, we had Dr. Bettina Long address the school, and much of it was new and interesting in its celebration of Black Joy. I would guess that "landed" with white students. As I was listening, I was scrolling Twitter somewhat absent-mindedly and there was a thread of mostly Black people talking about how they hate the term BIPOC or Black, Indigenous and People of Color. This largely comes from the fraught significance between "Colored People" and "People of Color."
To person not steeped in Chomsky and other forms of academic linguistics, the only difference between "Colored People" and "People of Color" is that the second one sounds weird. A knowledge of history would remind is that "Colored People" was a Jim Crow term. So "POC" is "decolonizing" language.
Now, there are certain terms that have come out recently, that I think work well. Intersectionality is both a very important idea and also pretty clear to anyone who has been to a traffic intersection. If it was called Interfaces Across Multiple Identifiers or IAMI it would suddenly fly over the heads of most listeners.
Dr. Long ended her talk by saying that racism can only end when White people decide to end it.
First, I wonder if that's true. We have a LOT of evidence that people naturally group together according to some sort of cultural signifier. This is the point of English and Kalla's paper. If a program is seen as helping reduce ECONOMIC inequality, people like it. Talk about RACIAL inequality and supports declines, even among Black people. Ending child poverty is great; ending poverty among "historically marginalized identifiers" polls poorly. If we could somehow miraculously end historic forms of racism I fear something else would take its place.
Second, let's assume that's true. How do we change White people? Because - as Yglesias notes - programs to address racism are not the problem, it's clothing non-racial programs in terms of racial equality that hurts their appeal. There is a segment of White America that wants to do better in race. Look at the reaction to the Chauvin verdict. You have 70% of Whites agreeing with the verdict, which means about 30% of Whites are basically cool with the extrajudicial murder or a Black man caught on camera. (I'm curious about the 7% of Blacks who disagreed with the verdict.) However, getting 54% of Republicans to agree that the verdict was correct means that the most obvious case of police brutality is sinking in even there. I doubt 54% of Republicans or 70% of Whites felt the same way about Eric Garner's death. So there's progress outside the Trumpian White Nationalist Right.
The question is "How do you build on that?" It's painfully obvious that what we are seeing is simply the fact that a ubiquity of cameras has exposed what Black America has always known and, in the words of Bluegrass musician Tyler Childers, is "shoving its roots through the screens in our face." There is an inflection moment happening. How do you leverage that?
I just don't think you do that by erecting walls of jargon to separate the Savvy from the Unwashed. There actually IS a degree of virtue signaling going on when you bring very technical, largely academic terms into public discourse. I know the shibboleth, you do not.
Back when Black Lives Matter began, Bernie Sanders stepped on a rake in 2016 when he replied with "All Lives Matter." In some ways, his presidential aspirations died right there. As activists explained, the reason Black lives matter is BECAUSE ALL lives should matter and they currently don't. It's a reasonably effective way of engaging people. It did, however, create an instant barrier that people like Sanders bumped into. Sanders, who was willing to engage, did engage, and was wiser for it. (It's not like, coming from Vermont, he had a lot of experience navigating issues of race.) It's similar to the idea of White Privilege. That concept is a really good challenge for people already interested in engaging with this issue.
I enjoy language, that's why I hate jargon. I feel I'm reasonably adept at language, and I don't know how to solve this dilemma. How do you reach the White boy in a way that simultaneously challenges him and supports his growth? The walls of jargon are not going to help.
Simply talking about the "Golden Rule" is insufficient for the activists and academics who are pushing for change on these issues, but something as simple as that could work. First, you teach people compassion and empathy and a sense of justice, while simultaneously teaching the truth about the past. I've found students remarkably receptive to the idea that almost all White people in the past held some sort of racist idea. In fact, not being racist by today's standards was a huge outlier.
As you point out how the Civil Rights movement used universal American values to frame their struggle, you are pointing out how to reach White Americans today. What the earlier - and more successful - part of the Civil Rights movement did was express their demands in terms of the American creed. The naked violence of Jim Crow was excused by White America for a century; Black America made them look, held up their own values and asked them to compare the two. That worked to change America.
Current scholarship and activism point out that this was not enough. (Again, I don't think we eradicate prejudice from human character. I'm pessimistic that way.) In creating laudable goals, they have also created barriers in language and pedagogy that makes it harder to engage precisely those White boys who are reachable (not all will be).
I don't think I have the answer, in fact, I know I don't. I worry that we will lose this inflection point in history. Every movement towards a more progressive, more just America meets its own backlash. In nakedly symbolic terms, every Obama creates its own Trump. We already see the frantic Fox News/Republican attacks on "wokeness," because that's all they've got...and it works.
It feels wrong to only offer an observation and not a solution, but that's the best I can do right now.
