Matthew Yglesias interviews John McWhorter about language, race, police, etc.
Ezra’s on vacation, so I asked @JohnHMcWhorter to come on the Weeds and talk about the changing way we talk about racism and the pros and cons of the Great Awokening. https://t.co/FcG5ceDaSf— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) July 31, 2020
Listen to the whole thing, but here's a sample:
Yglesias: A lot of what people are doing in this reckoning is actually linguistic in its nature.… I feel like a lot of what happens these days is a strong assumption that changing the way people talk about things is going to beat the racism out of them, or otherwise construct the world, and that we should really judge people based on their … mastery of up-to-date verbal formulas, rather than their actions in the world. And then there comes to be a kind of a weird class skewing to it. Because, I'm very current [with] whatever activists are saying, because, like, this is my job! So I can use "BIPOC" currently, I can do all the things. But just because somebody is, like, 60 and didn't go to college, that's going to really manifest in how they talk, right? And, like, is that really the most important thing?
McWhorter: Yeah, I think we have a problem, in that there is a sense that you can change thought by changing the terms that people use for things. And it's not that changing the terms can't help get a conversation going. But the truth is that if you don't change the thoughts underneath with good old-fashioned suasion, then the labels end up really just kind of floating along, and whatever label you come up with is going to become accreted with whatever negative associations you were worried about before. And then also what you're referring to is the fact that this idea of changing the names of things on a regular basis, and also being often rather condemnatory to people who aren't using the new labels — there is a class skew, there is an education skew.
And so, for example, with "Latinx," … I completely understand the impulse to get past old-fashioned ideas of gender, and to make a space for transgender identification, etc. But the simple truth of "Latinx" is that it's a term used by people, basically, in college towns and maybe a 5-mile radius around them.… For example, I live in a neighborhood where Latinos are, I'm pretty sure, the majority. So I am around Latinos every day. I have never once heard a single person in this neighborhood — Colombians, Ecuadorians, Venezuelans, not to mention many, many, many Dominicans — never heard anybody use the term "Latinx." And I'm listening, and my Spanish is not bad. And it's because it's an elite thing: I hear that at Columbia, I don't hear it among ordinary people.…
This is something that people should think about: "African-American" is something that came down in '89, '90. No one would've expected it. It happened very quickly. For a very long time, "black" was the term, then all of a sudden it was "African-American." And the idea was that "black" had certain negative associations, partly because of the nature of the color and its symbolism, and also because of what many people unfortunately think about black people. So "African-American" was thought of as more positive. It was thought of as something generated from within black people themselves.… Now, say what you want about that — it happened, it really caught on. Look at us now. 30 years later, "African-American" has accreted, for better or worse, all the associations that "black" used to have, such that now some people seem to be moving back towards "black." And some people used to explore, for a while, "person of color," but now apparently that's a narrower definition. The thing is, changing the name can only do so much; it's the thought that really counts.
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