Words matter. But racism and contempt exist in every language. Creating sterile alternatives in English alone is an act of linguistic colonialism
Over the last few decades, we have been browbeaten into political correctness, ending up politically pointless. By C Y Gopinath, using Midjourney
In 2000, when I left India and took up work with an American NGO in Kenya, I attended my first ever lunchtime brown-bag session. The idea, as explained to me, was a lunchtime chat on a random topic over sandwiches or burgers served in individual brown bags and paid for by the NGO. It was a social and stimulating hour.
Today, nearly a quarter century later, I have to be careful about calling for a ‘brown-bag’ session lest I unwittingly demean or offend some brown-skinned person. Bags of other colours could be equally treacherous. White bags could be landmines of the colonial kind, while lunches in yellow or black bags might just not look good on TikTok.
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Over the last few decades, we have been browbeaten into political correctness, ending up politically pointless. Voices tell us how to speak, teaching us words to avoid and recommending others. We are now masters—oops, that’s male-specific, make it competent—at toeing the line, no questions asked.
In the 1990s, I was rapped on the knuckles for saying prostitute instead of the newly approved sex worker. People infected with HIV had to be distinguished from those whose infection had progressed to AIDS and referred to as people living with HIV or people living with HIV and AIDS.
Always, we are now taught, put the person first. Thus, it’s persons with disability, persons with diabetes and of course, persons of colour. In this multiverse, a white person, naturally, is not a person of white colour.
A new family of words has emerged, spawned by the concept of challenged persons—vertically challenged (short); follically challenged (bald); behaviourally challenged (idiot); numerically challenged (minorities); and many others.
The unemployed are involuntarily leisured. Clumsy people are simply uniquely coordinated. People who make no sense are merely differently logical.
We are involuntary recipients of a watered-down, anodyne language that no one is offended by, and no one understands either. Here’s my question: where is all this coming from? When will it end?
It’s called equity language and it’s based on the premise that our words do make a difference. No argument there: Putin minimises his Ukraine invasion as a “special military operation”. Wedding parties killed in drone strikes are neutralised as “collateral damage”.
We are well into the age of linguistic authoritarianism.
The University of Southern California’s School of Social Work no longer says fieldwork lest it be linked with slavery or immigrant labour); the new preference is practicum. The Sierra Club prefers refuse to take action over the vivid paralysed by fear because, you know, don’t offend paralysed persons.
Also read: Battle ahead: Hindutva vs Mandal 2.0
Would you be richer as a person with limited financial resources than just plain piss poor?
Here’s an excerpt on Mumbai’s slum-dwellers from Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers — “The One Leg’s given name was Sita. She had fair skin, usually an asset, but the runt leg had smacked down her bride price. Her Hindu parents had taken the single offer they got: poor, unattractive, hard-working, Muslim, old—“half-dead, but who else wanted her,” as her mother had once said with a frown.”
George Packer, writing in The Atlantic, shows us how this paragraph would shrivel up into nothingness if recast in today’s equity language — “Sita was a person living with a disability. Because she lived in a system that centred whiteness while producing inequities among racial and ethnic groups, her physical appearance conferred an unearned set of privileges and benefits, but her disability lowered her status to potential partners. Her parents, who were Hindu persons, accepted a marriage proposal from a member of a community with limited financial resources, a person whose physical appearance was defined as being different from the traits of the dominant group and resulted in his being set apart for unequal treatment, a person who was considered in the dominant discourse to be “hardworking,” a Muslim person, an older person. In referring to him, Sita’s mother used language that is considered harmful by representatives of historically marginalised communities.”
Many of the rules of equity language are created by just a handful of members of a global activist organisation, SumOfUs. Their Progressive’s Style Guide, described as “compact, intersectional and emergent”, is pretty much the birthing place of the new equity language and is extensively dipped into by most other guides.
But three decades of relabelling prostitutes as sex workers has not changed the tragedies of their daily lives nor people’s attitudes towards them. They still fight for their basic rights and struggle for equality. Changing words has not changed minds.
It’s difficult to argue that words don’t matter because they do. But discrimination, racism and contempt exist in every language. Creating sterile alternatives in English alone is an act of linguistic colonialism by itself.
Consider Hindi. A person with a disability becomes woh vyakti jiske paas viklangta hai. Far pithier and more tweetable is, alas, apang vyakti—which means “disabled person”.
Do we have a “politically correct” in Hindi? I checked and found rajnitik shuddhata. Tsk tsk.
Oh dear. That’s something we’ve not had for a long time.
You can reach C Y Gopinath at cygopi@gmail.com
Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com
The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper
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