Cleaning Out Those Nooks and Crannies

I’m changing—trying to change—the way I look at and use language.

I started my life immersed in words: reading, writing, thinking. I probably mistook language for something immortal simply because I worshipped at its altar. Perhaps I should have taken a page from my first career goal, that of becoming an archaeologist: the only things written in stone are, in fact, stone.

But I didn’t. Of all the world’s curmudgeons, I was the most curmudgeonly. I was a strong proponent of linguistic relativity, and that automatically requires the search for the perfect, “correct” use of language, if indeed it is language that creates, channels, and influences thought. You kind of have to be something of a curmudgeon to feel that way.

I’ve mellowed since then. I still believe that language has the power to frame our thoughts and certainly our communication, but I also see it now as a living thing, something that changes with the needs of the people who use it. It’s not a one-way street: it’s a conversation between a culture and its language. How does the language represent the culture? How is the culture informed by the language?

As a feminist, I’ve long been advocating changes to a language used for decades if not centuries that often demeans women. But more recently—as is no doubt true for many white, privileged people—I’ve been assessing what I can do to change a culture of racial as well as gender subjugation, and so naturally language is the first place I turn. And some things are a quick fix. Capitalizing “Black” when it refers to people (see this explanation by the Columbia School of Journalism) is an obvious first step. But racism is so entrenched in the language that it’s not always obvious how to root it out.

Recently I was joking around with a colleague, and I said, without thinking about it, “What a slave-driver you are!”

Um, no. Insisting in a professional setting that a colleague do their work well and on time is not the same as someone whipping the backs of people they purport to own.

It just brought home to me how difficult this work is, how deeply rooted are expressions that as a white person I never thought about. I wonder how that thoughtless remark of mine would have sounded to a Black person.

We have so much to do, on so many levels, but one of our goals as people of letters must be to search all the nooks and crannies of our language, the places where racist imagery lies in wait, the unexpected moments of truth.

And then…. tell that truth.