To be blunt, I think this post completely, and possibly wilfully, misrepresents Scott’s post. Every single one of your points appears to be a strawman:
1. The post implies it’s important not to change the words we use to refer to minority groups, but Scott doesn’t say why.
The post makes the claim hyperstitious cascades are bad, where previously innocent words that noone took offense to become taboo, not changing the words we use to refer to minority groups. He also explains his reasoning perfectly clearly, as gjm points out.
2. The post needlessly drags its feet against the fact that language evolves.
Again that’s not Scotts point. Scott is concerned about deliberate attempts to rapidly make a perfectly innocent word taboo, causing bother and potential ostracism to everyone for no reason, not natural long term evolution of words.
3. The post exaggerates the pace and breadth of lexical change… citing a purely hypothetical example (“Asian”).
Scott cites many, many examples, e.g. “jap”, “negro”, “all lives matter”, the confederate flag etc. “negro” was certainly quick—acceptable in 1966, completely unacceptable as far back as I can remember (so by about 2000).
4. The post exaggerates the arbitrariness of lexical change.
The post is not about new minority groups choosing new words for themselves. If a group of people choose to do that, that would be fine, and given Scott’s other views he would be the last to disagree. It’s about people turning old words and ideas taboo, just by negatively tarring anyone who uses them until it triggers a cascade. The problem isn’t that most of the black people in the USA got together and said they prefer to be called black. It’s that due to a single bad actor making up a fake history for an innocent word, lots of old grandpas get ostracised by their grandkids for being racist.
The post makes the claim hyperstitious cascades are bad, where previously innocent words that noone took offense to become taboo
A major claim I’m making is that this has never actually happened in history, and certainly not in any of the examples Scott uses. Words become taboo because they are used offensively.
As mentioned in another comment, I think it’s pretty plausible that various things in Scott’s account of what happened with “negro” and “black” are wrong. But it doesn’t currently look plausible to me that the switch between them happened because “negro” was being used offensively. Do you disagree? I don’t have strong evidence and I think could be readily persuaded if you happen to have some. I mostly think the switch wasn’t caused by widespread offensive use of “negro” because none of the things I’ve seen written about it says anything of the kind. To be clear, I’m sure that many racists used the term “negro” while being racist before 1966, just as many racists use the term “black” while being racist now. But I’m not aware of reason to think that “negro” was preferentially used by racists before the n->b shift.
(It may well be that racists did preferentially use “negro” rather than “black” in the later parts of the process, as a result of the mechanism Scott describes, but obviously that wouldn’t be an argument against his position. So I take it you mean that there was widespread offensive use of “negro” before the switch from “negro” to “black”, rather than only once the switch was underway as predicted by Scott’s analysis.)
The roots of “Black” go back further than 1966. For example, here are two excerpts from Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963 (emphasis mine):
When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men — yes, Black men as well as white men — would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
And when this happens, and when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, Black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: Free at last. Free at last. Thank God almighty, we are free at last.
The relevant question, if you ask me, is which word was used racistly less often. My guess is “Black”. That’s what I mean when I say words become taboo because they are used offensively; they become associated with, e.g., racism.
“Black” also had the virtue of being a label of endogenous origin. Per point (4) in the OP.
Are these two reasons (being used racistly less often and endogenous origin) good enough reasons to change the word we use for this group of people? Yes, I argue. The benefits greatly outweigh the costs.
Per point (1) in the OP, the costs of changing are low. Per point (2), the cost of changing the words we use is a cost we willingly incur all the time, for much less good reasons. Per point (3), it’s not a cost we’ll have to incur very often, as endogenous group labels seem to have incredible longevity.
I hope you find this argument addresses the relevant points and doesn’t skirt any important issues. I tried my best to address the crux of the matter head on while being as concise as possible.
I wrote a lengthy reply, but I find that I also want to say something briefer.
The specific claims you made in the great-grandparent of this comment were that “this [sc. previously inoffensive words becoming taboo] has never actually happened in history” and that “Words become taboo because they are used offensively”. And the specific thing I challenged you on is whether that is in fact why “black” became taboo.
(Of course on Scott’s account the final stage of the process is “because they are used offensively”. What you disagree with is whether that’s how it starts.)
Your comment doesn’t offer any evidence that the switch from “negro” to “black” happened because “negro” was being used offensively. I would be very interested in evidence that it did.
I don’t think anyone is claiming that SC/KT invented the term “black”! (It goes back much much further than MLK in 1963. The earliest citation in the OED that’s clearly basically the same usage as we have now is from 1667; there are others that might be basically the same usage as we have now from centuries before.)
But I think it’s generally held that it was SC/KT’s activism beginning in 1966 that led to the change from “negro” being the usual term and “black” being the usual term.
I agree that the relevant question is something like “which was used more for racism”. More precisely, something like “for which was the (racist use) / (non-racist use) ratio higher”, or maybe something harder to express that gives more weight to more severely racist uses. (Consider The Word Which Is Not Exactly “Negro”; that may actually have a rather low racist/nonracist ratio because of its use within black communities and its extreme taboo-ness outside, but when someone uses it for racism they’re probably being more drastically racist than, say, someone who is slightly less inclined to hire black candidates[1].)
[1] I’m not, to be clear, saying that the less-drastic racism doesn’t matter. It may well, in the aggregate, be more of a problem than the more-drastic racism, if there’s enough more of it. When I say things like “more severe” I am referring to the severity of one particular instance.
Do you have communicable reasons for your guess that “black” was less often used in a racist way? I don’t have strong opinions on that point myself.
It doesn’t seem at all true that “black” was a label of endogenous origin. White people were using “black” to talk about black people at least as far back as the 17th century, and I don’t see any reason to think that they got that usage by listening to how black people talked about one another.
Of course, once SC/KT persuaded a lot of people that they should use “black”, it became a label of endogenous origin, not in the sense that the word originated among black people but in the sense that the push for its widespread use came from among black people. That’s a reason for us to use it now, but not so much a reason why “black” was better than “negro” at the time. (I’m not very sure about this. Maybe it was. If so, we would have to say that if SC/KT had decided that “negro” was the better term and written things like “We must refuse to be called black, the colour of darkness and night and evil and ignorance, and wear proudly the name of Negro, for it alone refers to our whole race and nothing but”, and a bunch of others had been persuaded, then “negro” would have been better than “black” because it was “of endogenous origin” in just the same way. In other words, any complaint along the lines of “So-and-so just arbitrarily decided that we should all use word A rather than word B, and that’s not a good reason why word B should become unusable” is (provided so-and-so is from the group being referred to) necessarily invalid. I’m not sure how I feel about that idea.
I very much agree that if the word most commonly used to describe a group of people is widely used offensively[2], and that group wants to adopt a new term, then everyone else should[3] go along with that. (There will likely be a “slur cascade” of the type Scott describes at the tail end of the process, but I don’t think that’s any sort of problem; the trouble with “slur cascades” isn’t that there’s something specially evil about the process but that it can impose a change even when there isn’t any other good reason for the change, which wouldn’t be the case in this scenario.)
[2] Meaning that the word itself is used to insult/belittle/threaten/...; I don’t think things are so clear-cut if the situation is just that the group is hated and this word is the one everyone uses to describe them, haters and non-haters alike. There could be some value in a new word to get away from the negative associations caused by the haters, but if the haters are still there and still hating then most likely all that will happen is that the new word gets the same associations as the old; maybe better first to do something about the haters and then to adopt a new word without the baggage.
[3] Aside for stupid cases where there’s something specially unreasonable about the new term—imagine SC/KT saying “Henceforth we shall be known as the Masters of the Universe”. This sort of thing is hardly ever a real issue, of course.
I mostly agree with your reasons, except that I’m not so sure that “endogenous group labels seem to have incredible longevity”; I don’t think we have that much data, and while “black” and “gay” have persisted pretty well there was a time when it seemed very possible that “African-American” (and obvious variants outside America) would take over, in which case “black” would surely have become offensive.
In any case, so far as I can tell no one is arguing that we should start calling black people “Negroes” again. That would be a terrible idea even if the process by which everyone switched from “Negro” to “black” had been a pure “slur cascade”. I think the questions that actually matter are (1) how often do these “slur cascades” happen, (2) are the changes involved generally good or bad ones aside from the slur cascade, and (3) how should we respond?
It still isn’t clear to me how slur-cascade-y the “Negro”->”black” switch was, but that switch is already done. But what about “blacklist” (allegedly perpetuates negative associations with “black”), “the poor” (allegedly dehumanizing), “Latin{a,o}” (allegedly more sexist than “Latinx”), “field work” (allegedly potentially distressing to people whose ancestors were enslaved and forced to work in fields), “master copy” (allegedly potentially distressing to people whose ancestors were enslaved and forced to work for masters), etc.? Scott proposes that when faced with such a word we (1) evaluate whether it’s actually doing any harm—as he agrees “Jap” was in the 1950s and doesn’t think “field work” is now—and then (2) if it seems harmless-in-itself, resist the cascade until say 70% of the way down.
You might want to add (1.5) also evaluate whether what’s going on is that some group of people wants to be referred to differently, and then (2′) generally don’t resist in that case even if no harm is apparent, because (a) maybe there’s harm you haven’t noticed and (b) giving people what they want is usually good. I’d certainly be on board with that. (I suspect Scott would too.)
I guess a large part of our disagreement here is that you’re framing Scott’s post as being all about names for minority groups and I don’t think it is. Some of the (real and hypothetical) examples he uses are about names for minority groups (“Jap”, “negro/black”, “Asian”); some aren’t (some aren’t even words—he mentions slogans like “all lives matter”, images like Confederate flags, actions like eating at Chick-Fil-A, etc.; but also labels like “fieldwork” and “the French” which aren’t names of minority groups[4].)
[4] Well, I suppose technically the French are a minority group, in that most people are not French. But they aren’t an identifiable group within a larger society who are frequently subject to discrimination and persecution on account of belonging to that group.
You might want to add (1.5) also evaluate whether what’s going on is that some group of people wants to be referred to differently, and then (2′) generally don’t resist in that case even if no harm is apparent, because (a) maybe there’s harm you haven’t noticed and (b) giving people what they want is usually good. I’d certainly be on board with that. (I suspect Scott would too.)
I think this is pretty much my argument. I think Scott wouldn’t agree because he wrote:
On the other hand, the people who want to be the first person in a new cascade, like USC’s social work department, are contemptible. And the people who join when it’s only reached 1% or 5%, out of enthusiastic conformity or pre-emptive fear, are pathetic.
(none of this applies to things being done for good reasons—banning actually harmful things—I’m just skeptical that this process gets used for that very often)
I don’t think those paragraphs indicate that Scott wouldn’t agree. (I don’t know for sure that he would agree either, but I don’t think those paragraphs tell us much.)
Again that’s not Scotts point. Scott is concerned about deliberate attempts to rapidly make a perfectly innocent word taboo, causing bother and potential ostracism to everyone for no reason, not natural long term evolution of words.
I don’t think such an attempt has ever happened and succeeded. I’m open to counterexamples, though.
The problem isn’t that most of the black people in the USA got together and said they prefer to be called black. It’s that due to a single bad actor making up a fake history for an innocent word, lots of old grandpas get ostracised by their grandkids for being racist.
I think Scott’s account of the history of the term “Black” is dubious.
To be blunt, I think this post completely, and possibly wilfully, misrepresents Scott’s post. Every single one of your points appears to be a strawman:
1. The post implies it’s important not to change the words we use to refer to minority groups, but Scott doesn’t say why.
The post makes the claim hyperstitious cascades are bad, where previously innocent words that noone took offense to become taboo, not changing the words we use to refer to minority groups. He also explains his reasoning perfectly clearly, as gjm points out.
2. The post needlessly drags its feet against the fact that language evolves.
Again that’s not Scotts point. Scott is concerned about deliberate attempts to rapidly make a perfectly innocent word taboo, causing bother and potential ostracism to everyone for no reason, not natural long term evolution of words.
3. The post exaggerates the pace and breadth of lexical change… citing a purely hypothetical example (“Asian”).
Scott cites many, many examples, e.g. “jap”, “negro”, “all lives matter”, the confederate flag etc. “negro” was certainly quick—acceptable in 1966, completely unacceptable as far back as I can remember (so by about 2000).
4. The post exaggerates the arbitrariness of lexical change.
The post is not about new minority groups choosing new words for themselves. If a group of people choose to do that, that would be fine, and given Scott’s other views he would be the last to disagree. It’s about people turning old words and ideas taboo, just by negatively tarring anyone who uses them until it triggers a cascade. The problem isn’t that most of the black people in the USA got together and said they prefer to be called black. It’s that due to a single bad actor making up a fake history for an innocent word, lots of old grandpas get ostracised by their grandkids for being racist.
A major claim I’m making is that this has never actually happened in history, and certainly not in any of the examples Scott uses. Words become taboo because they are used offensively.
As mentioned in another comment, I think it’s pretty plausible that various things in Scott’s account of what happened with “negro” and “black” are wrong. But it doesn’t currently look plausible to me that the switch between them happened because “negro” was being used offensively. Do you disagree? I don’t have strong evidence and I think could be readily persuaded if you happen to have some. I mostly think the switch wasn’t caused by widespread offensive use of “negro” because none of the things I’ve seen written about it says anything of the kind. To be clear, I’m sure that many racists used the term “negro” while being racist before 1966, just as many racists use the term “black” while being racist now. But I’m not aware of reason to think that “negro” was preferentially used by racists before the n->b shift.
(It may well be that racists did preferentially use “negro” rather than “black” in the later parts of the process, as a result of the mechanism Scott describes, but obviously that wouldn’t be an argument against his position. So I take it you mean that there was widespread offensive use of “negro” before the switch from “negro” to “black”, rather than only once the switch was underway as predicted by Scott’s analysis.)
The roots of “Black” go back further than 1966. For example, here are two excerpts from Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963 (emphasis mine):
The relevant question, if you ask me, is which word was used racistly less often. My guess is “Black”. That’s what I mean when I say words become taboo because they are used offensively; they become associated with, e.g., racism.
“Black” also had the virtue of being a label of endogenous origin. Per point (4) in the OP.
Are these two reasons (being used racistly less often and endogenous origin) good enough reasons to change the word we use for this group of people? Yes, I argue. The benefits greatly outweigh the costs.
Per point (1) in the OP, the costs of changing are low. Per point (2), the cost of changing the words we use is a cost we willingly incur all the time, for much less good reasons. Per point (3), it’s not a cost we’ll have to incur very often, as endogenous group labels seem to have incredible longevity.
I hope you find this argument addresses the relevant points and doesn’t skirt any important issues. I tried my best to address the crux of the matter head on while being as concise as possible.
I wrote a lengthy reply, but I find that I also want to say something briefer.
The specific claims you made in the great-grandparent of this comment were that “this [sc. previously inoffensive words becoming taboo] has never actually happened in history” and that “Words become taboo because they are used offensively”. And the specific thing I challenged you on is whether that is in fact why “black” became taboo.
(Of course on Scott’s account the final stage of the process is “because they are used offensively”. What you disagree with is whether that’s how it starts.)
Your comment doesn’t offer any evidence that the switch from “negro” to “black” happened because “negro” was being used offensively. I would be very interested in evidence that it did.
I don’t think anyone is claiming that SC/KT invented the term “black”! (It goes back much much further than MLK in 1963. The earliest citation in the OED that’s clearly basically the same usage as we have now is from 1667; there are others that might be basically the same usage as we have now from centuries before.)
But I think it’s generally held that it was SC/KT’s activism beginning in 1966 that led to the change from “negro” being the usual term and “black” being the usual term.
I agree that the relevant question is something like “which was used more for racism”. More precisely, something like “for which was the (racist use) / (non-racist use) ratio higher”, or maybe something harder to express that gives more weight to more severely racist uses. (Consider The Word Which Is Not Exactly “Negro”; that may actually have a rather low racist/nonracist ratio because of its use within black communities and its extreme taboo-ness outside, but when someone uses it for racism they’re probably being more drastically racist than, say, someone who is slightly less inclined to hire black candidates[1].)
[1] I’m not, to be clear, saying that the less-drastic racism doesn’t matter. It may well, in the aggregate, be more of a problem than the more-drastic racism, if there’s enough more of it. When I say things like “more severe” I am referring to the severity of one particular instance.
Do you have communicable reasons for your guess that “black” was less often used in a racist way? I don’t have strong opinions on that point myself.
It doesn’t seem at all true that “black” was a label of endogenous origin. White people were using “black” to talk about black people at least as far back as the 17th century, and I don’t see any reason to think that they got that usage by listening to how black people talked about one another.
Of course, once SC/KT persuaded a lot of people that they should use “black”, it became a label of endogenous origin, not in the sense that the word originated among black people but in the sense that the push for its widespread use came from among black people. That’s a reason for us to use it now, but not so much a reason why “black” was better than “negro” at the time. (I’m not very sure about this. Maybe it was. If so, we would have to say that if SC/KT had decided that “negro” was the better term and written things like “We must refuse to be called black, the colour of darkness and night and evil and ignorance, and wear proudly the name of Negro, for it alone refers to our whole race and nothing but”, and a bunch of others had been persuaded, then “negro” would have been better than “black” because it was “of endogenous origin” in just the same way. In other words, any complaint along the lines of “So-and-so just arbitrarily decided that we should all use word A rather than word B, and that’s not a good reason why word B should become unusable” is (provided so-and-so is from the group being referred to) necessarily invalid. I’m not sure how I feel about that idea.
I very much agree that if the word most commonly used to describe a group of people is widely used offensively[2], and that group wants to adopt a new term, then everyone else should[3] go along with that. (There will likely be a “slur cascade” of the type Scott describes at the tail end of the process, but I don’t think that’s any sort of problem; the trouble with “slur cascades” isn’t that there’s something specially evil about the process but that it can impose a change even when there isn’t any other good reason for the change, which wouldn’t be the case in this scenario.)
[2] Meaning that the word itself is used to insult/belittle/threaten/...; I don’t think things are so clear-cut if the situation is just that the group is hated and this word is the one everyone uses to describe them, haters and non-haters alike. There could be some value in a new word to get away from the negative associations caused by the haters, but if the haters are still there and still hating then most likely all that will happen is that the new word gets the same associations as the old; maybe better first to do something about the haters and then to adopt a new word without the baggage.
[3] Aside for stupid cases where there’s something specially unreasonable about the new term—imagine SC/KT saying “Henceforth we shall be known as the Masters of the Universe”. This sort of thing is hardly ever a real issue, of course.
I mostly agree with your reasons, except that I’m not so sure that “endogenous group labels seem to have incredible longevity”; I don’t think we have that much data, and while “black” and “gay” have persisted pretty well there was a time when it seemed very possible that “African-American” (and obvious variants outside America) would take over, in which case “black” would surely have become offensive.
In any case, so far as I can tell no one is arguing that we should start calling black people “Negroes” again. That would be a terrible idea even if the process by which everyone switched from “Negro” to “black” had been a pure “slur cascade”. I think the questions that actually matter are (1) how often do these “slur cascades” happen, (2) are the changes involved generally good or bad ones aside from the slur cascade, and (3) how should we respond?
It still isn’t clear to me how slur-cascade-y the “Negro”->”black” switch was, but that switch is already done. But what about “blacklist” (allegedly perpetuates negative associations with “black”), “the poor” (allegedly dehumanizing), “Latin{a,o}” (allegedly more sexist than “Latinx”), “field work” (allegedly potentially distressing to people whose ancestors were enslaved and forced to work in fields), “master copy” (allegedly potentially distressing to people whose ancestors were enslaved and forced to work for masters), etc.? Scott proposes that when faced with such a word we (1) evaluate whether it’s actually doing any harm—as he agrees “Jap” was in the 1950s and doesn’t think “field work” is now—and then (2) if it seems harmless-in-itself, resist the cascade until say 70% of the way down.
You might want to add (1.5) also evaluate whether what’s going on is that some group of people wants to be referred to differently, and then (2′) generally don’t resist in that case even if no harm is apparent, because (a) maybe there’s harm you haven’t noticed and (b) giving people what they want is usually good. I’d certainly be on board with that. (I suspect Scott would too.)
I guess a large part of our disagreement here is that you’re framing Scott’s post as being all about names for minority groups and I don’t think it is. Some of the (real and hypothetical) examples he uses are about names for minority groups (“Jap”, “negro/black”, “Asian”); some aren’t (some aren’t even words—he mentions slogans like “all lives matter”, images like Confederate flags, actions like eating at Chick-Fil-A, etc.; but also labels like “fieldwork” and “the French” which aren’t names of minority groups[4].)
[4] Well, I suppose technically the French are a minority group, in that most people are not French. But they aren’t an identifiable group within a larger society who are frequently subject to discrimination and persecution on account of belonging to that group.
I think this is pretty much my argument. I think Scott wouldn’t agree because he wrote:
I don’t think those paragraphs indicate that Scott wouldn’t agree. (I don’t know for sure that he would agree either, but I don’t think those paragraphs tell us much.)
I don’t think such an attempt has ever happened and succeeded. I’m open to counterexamples, though.
I think Scott’s account of the history of the term “Black” is dubious.