use and abuse of the atomic bomb, and other words weighted in history

So I read about some--disagreements--with insanejournal user bridgetmkennitt's Author List that lists some of the authors that have contributed to RaceFail's failure parts and links to the reason why.

Links to these posts via rydra_wong in this post and this post regarding the above.

blacklist
A blacklist (or black list) is a list or register of persons who, for one reason or another, are being denied a particular privilege, service, mobility, access or recognition.

I'm not getting this. I mean, I will be honest--example, freaking Twilight gets panned thirty ways from Sunday. Everywhere. As a group, journalers and bloggers do this. This is not a magical new thing brought out just to destroy lives and tattoo a virtual swastika on people or something, and I just Godwin'ed myself. It is not a POC retaliatory plot with some kind of dark master group directing from above. This is, to put it plainly, a journaler saying "These people make me uncomfortable in their fiction and in their views, so I am not reading their work in the future, and I will link you to why I feel this way" which is, in fact, a shitload more than I ever do when I hate things publicly in LJ. In general, it's more than most of us do when panning movies, books, or TV shows, or what have you. I spent two LJ entries hating Joan Aiken, in detail. It's not like anyone in the blogosphere is what I'd call shy about saying what they hate and devoting a few thousand entries to it.

blacklist
As a verb, to blacklist can mean to deny someone work in a particular field, or to ostracize them from a certain social circle.

It's the same attitude that was expressed with the "omgtheywillboycottevil!" which again, blew my mind, and not because there was no actual boycott planned, but because the issue was being removed very neatly from "these are problems with writers for Tor/editors for Tor and their views" and "you are plotting against us to force us into the evils of PCness and no longer judging me silently".

And I think the issue comes down to that, actually, when I read backward and ask myself "Why for the love of God would you (plural persons) give a shit about what anyone blogs about?"

blacklist
The term blacklisting is generally used in a pejorative context, as it implies that someone has been prevented from having legitimate access to something due to the whims or judgments of another.

There are powerful words being thrown like grenades or dynamite. Striking words, words weighted with history, that taste of McCarthyism and Proposition 8 and every way that people in power have attempted to silence people who had none. Blacklist. Boycott. Thought Police. These have been, are, will be weapons of silencing, actions that were taken against, among other things, people demanding social change.

blacklist
For example, a person being served with a restraining order for having threatened another person would not be considered a case of blacklisting. However, somebody who is fired for exposing poor working conditions in a particular company, and is subsequently blocked from finding work in that industry, may be considered to have been blacklisted.

To use them now--to use them in the blogosphere, among journalers, to toss them out like confetti at a particularly irritating party--is to demean the words and the power they had when they were used, to remove them from the context of their existence--to remove them from the histories of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions who were silenced.

blacklist
Blacklisting can and has been accomplished informally and by consensus of authority figures, and does not necessarily require a physical list or overt written record.

It strips it of meaning, of what the blacklist was meant to do to people. To call this a blacklist is about as accurate as calling racism just prejudice. To be effective, a blacklist must be backed by the power to enforce it, and the person posting it does not have that kind of power. She has no publishing power--she cannot stop a book from being read. She has no editorial power--she cannot stop their books from being published. She does not own a major bookstore chain--she cannot stop their books from appearing on the shelves. And she does not control the credit card industry, so she cannot stop the books that are bought. What she has is a blog and a strong opinion and the will and desire to share what she thinks and believes.

We've seen so many tools of forcing silence--the outing of coffeeandink because she was too loud, the attack on psuedonyms because too many were willing to speak, the accusations of trolling to discredit those that might think on the words that were spoken, the tone argument that never fucking ends, the murmurs of a POC brigade that forces everyone to agree or else, the oversensitivity arguments, the bad apples argument, now the blacklist/boycott argument, of all things to drag out like the next weapon in the arsenal of sit down and shut up. Each is a redirect away from the question that should have been asked from the start. And it's such a simple question. It's five words.

"What if they were right?"

In a genre based on what-if, this question is ignored.

Redirect. The criticisms were justified. Redirect. We want to talk about the problems inherent in how race is portrayed in sci-fi, media, and literature. Redirect. Stop telling everyone to shut up. Redirect. Stop telling us what we should be talking about. Redirect. Stop threatening us with outing.. Redirect. Stop calling us trolls. Redirect. Stop attacks on the concept of pseudonyms. Redirect. Stop calling this a blacklist/a boycott. Redirect. Stop saying we're a POC mob requiring blood oaths. Redirect. Redirect. Redirect. Redirect. Redirect. Redirect. Fucking redirect because maybe two months of this, everyone will forget what this is about.

This is how it started. And this is how we tell it.

We're still talking. We want to talk about this. We aren't done yet.

One might venture to say discussion is what we do.

Note: I read today during link jumping that blacklist is possibly a racist term. If anyone would link me up to that, I'd be grateful. Wikipedia says it does not have an etymology in ethnicity, but that doesn't mean there isn't one there or hasn't developed one in current use. So my apologies to anyone who is offended by the use of the word; I tried to keep its use in specific context to what was being discussed.

Comments

[seperis.livejournal.com]

I have to respectfully disagree with pretty much all of this. While you cite that word use as a problem in that paragraph, I found the entire entry, especially that paragraph, not just questionable but offensive.

But since we are talking about this particular word, I'll narrow my focus away from the so-called stain of political correctness. I cannot imagine under any circumstances calling my mother a cunt or using that word in her presence for any reason. I don't even like the word in erotica, because it's connotations have so often been used to the disparagement of women. That aside, I won't use it. I respect my mother enough that if that word causes her distress, it's surprisingly easy never to use it. If a group of people find that this word is offensive because it mimics so strongly one of the most offensive racist terms that can be used against another human being, I won't use it, whether or not I agree, whether or not I have any particular emotional investment in a word that's nearly archaic and half a given audience wouldn't understand anyway. I'd make the argument that at some point, this could have been my favorite word and I entirely disagree, and I still would give it up without so much as a thought. I've never cared for it from the first time I heard it spoken and flinched myself before I realized what had been said.

Political correctness has turned into a filthy term for reasons I don't understand. In the form which it is meant to encompass, it asks for respect for the feelings of others in what you say, and to recognize words have power, perhaps most often when used unintentionally. If niggardly makes a person I work with, I interact with, I hang out with, pass on the street flinch, if it can so easily sound like an offensive racist term, it's gone.

[tevriel.livejournal.com]

Political correctness has turned into a filthy term for reasons I don't understand. In the form which it is meant to encompass, it asks for respect for the feelings of others in what you say, and to recognize words have power, perhaps most often when used unintentionally. If niggardly makes a person I work with, I interact with, I hang out with, pass on the street flinch, if it can so easily sound like an offensive racist term, it's gone.

Yes. Exactly this. The oh-so-hilarious examples of Political Correctness Gone Mad, like someone changing a tray label from "Coloured Paper" to "Paper of Colour"? So thoroughly beside the point it's just stupid. The idea is simply to avoid hurting people, and that, as a goal, is of the sort where I can't respect anyone who opposes it. Dismantling the linguistic mechanisms of racism/sexism/ablism/all of it is RIGHT, dammit.

[seperis.livejournal.com]

Yes, this.

I always laughed at those ridiculous example. It was like watching them fly far, far overhead, while the point stayed on the ground, wondering where on earth they were going.

[seperis.livejournal.com]

It's not my right to decide for any group to reclaim a word on their behalf, however. If I were gay, I might get behind reclaiming queer. As a woman, there's a strong movement to reclaim bitch. If I were a POC, then I'd have the right to make that kind of decision. But reclamation cannot be carried out by a white girl on behalf of the POC, just like no male can claim he's making cunt an empowering word for my sex.

Political correctness is not an absolute. What's correct to you may not be correct for me. What you chose to remove from your language is not a requirement for me. And should I continue to use a word you don't, that's my prerogative.

No, it's a personal choice to decide the power of the words you use and what weight they carry and how much you (plural) care about how they affect others. My choice, when possible, is to minimize how much hurt I cause by using air in a set of sounds that have a powerful meaning to some people and makes their lives less pleasant. And some people make the choice not to call me a godless whore for having a son out of wedlock and refusing to name the father. I don't think often of what isn't said, but maybe I should. This may be the first time I actually appreciate not being called the following terms: slut, whore, trollop, bitch, cunt, pussy, piece of tail.

So for me, it's incredibly easy to remove some terms from my vocabulary. I can't ask others to not define me by my sexual traits or the fact I gave birth to a bastard child--wait, I think we use illegitimate now for that--or maybe we use nothing at all--maybe we got over an offensive designation. I wouldn't know. People don't use those terms when they speak to me. The could, though. It's not an absolute, after all. It's a personal choice.

[thatratorpheus.livejournal.com]

I think "political correctness" has always been used in a sarcastic way to describe "good" thinking which has turned into dogma. I think the term came from the communist usage of "correct", to mean thinking which adhered to the dictates of the state. Depending on who's using the term it can be more or less perjorative, but I don't think "political correctness" was ever intended to be a favorable term.

But, having said that, I completely agree with you about the power of words to hurt, whatever their innocent origins. I can't even type the "c" word. I don't care how many people try to reclaim its power (if it ever had any), there are too many years of negativity attached to it. The "scholarly" argument doesn't work here - anyone with pretensions to linguistic scholarship should understand the important of language drift.

[tevriel.livejournal.com]

Saying that he has a point in "one of the things" he says doesn't invalidate elements of fail in everthing else someone says; instead, it's exactly the kind of derail people have been fighting against.

A gentleman of my acquaintance once attempted to defend the phrase "nigger in the woodpile" as not-racist; where he came from, nigger isn't a word used to describe black people, because they have lots of other words to use and that one just isn't part of the context, but a nigger is a worm or termite of some kind (I forget) that will turn your woodpile into so much raddled junk that burns far less well.

Eventually, he was persuaded that this was problematic regardless of its provenance.

Niggardly is a word that doesn't strike me as racist, but I wouldn't use it because it bothers people; I won't say that's why I don't use it, because the main reason I don't use it is that I don't feel the need to and never have. It's just not that useful a word. It conveys nothing that can't be carried by synonyms; odds were either it or one of its synonyms was going to fall into disuse anyway, and "it sounds a bit racist" is as good a reason for niggardly to be the one that falls behind as any.

(Regarding this and my other comment on this post: Spot the History/Linguistics double major, hey.)

[tevriel.livejournal.com]

A friend of mine has been dealing with the education of a young man who, when we first met him, was capable of enthusiastically voicing neo-Nazi points of view, and who didn't understand the very concept that being nice to people could be a good thing, including for himself.

Is this guy a bad person? Hard to say. The thing is, his socialisation is, patently, hideous; he wasn't raised to believe any of the things that most of us take for granted, like "hurting other people's feelings is bad". He's not actually a sociopath but he had zero concept of empathy.

My friend successfully identified a worthwhile spark in this young man; the tiny, flickering flame of capacity, at least, to learn. What the rest of us had missed, arguing with him about subjects like "racism is bad", was that the discontinuity he had with our way of thinking wasn't at the "racism: good or bad" point, but the "people's feelings: worth considering in any way at all" point. It's like in overcoming his observable prejudices and such he's starting with a ten mile handicap on a one mile race.

The thing is, there is no way in hell this guy is, even yet, really, capable of breaking down his racism. He's still learning to overcome his induced sociopathy.

Fortunately, few people are that bad, but I think it's true, as my friend who's been going to the trouble of trying to redeem the guy believes, that almost no-one is really, truly unreachable; it's just a matter of finding the point at which their disjuncture from reasonable thought takes place.

Of course, since there's no way he would have been capable of having the conversation with actual non-white people (I don't know where he's at now; we're not friends, because I can't deal with him, even though knowing more about his socialisation's flaws helps me not hate him), this is why changing the world requires everyone's involvement. The only person who could have reached this young man is a white male with endless patience and a strong will in any argument to find the point of commonality (from which point he tries to lead people to his own point of view; it's very effective). There are others, not quite as badly brought up, who will still only listen to white people; it's our job, I think, as white anti-racists, to get these people to the point where they're capable of going further and educating themselves separately.

Preferably, that will include staying with them past the point where they're likely to look at non-white people in the expectation of Being Educated. (I hate that. I read non-white strangers' journals/blogs because they write about things I find interesting. Why would I expect them to be teaching me the Authentic Ethnic Experience?)

[tree]

Anyone who thinks this is a racist term, no matter what your skin color, needs to get themselves to a dictionary.

since i couldn't quite remember what the dictionary definition of the term is, i looked it up. this is what my dictionary (OED) has to say:

USAGE This word, along with its adverbial form niggardly, should be used with caution. Owing to the sound similarity to the highly inflammatory racial epithet nigger, these words can cause unnecessary confusion and unintentional offense.

knee-jerk reactions to what you THINK is racism may be as bad as racism itself

i must disagree with that. because at the end of the day, the person accused of racism and his/her hurt feelings still goes home to their privilege, while the person who has racism enacted against them is once again reminded that s/he is worth less as a human being to society in general.

i'm not sure how false accusations of rape demean the real victims. who are the "real" victims? in the situation of rape, the person who is raped is the victim. in the situation of false accusation, the person who is falsely accused is the victim. then, of course, there's the difference between accusations made in a legal sense and in a non-legal sense. i'd argue that false accusation of racism ≠ false accusation of rape.

[tree]

So, what kind of "privilege" is it to correctly use the English language?

i'm not entirely sure what you're asking here. i think you're beginning with the proposition that using the word niggardly in correct context is not racist and therefore it's okay to use it. i take no issue with that. but in your original statement you pointed people who thought it was racist towards a dictionary. i merely showed you what my dictionary said - which is that it's understood to be a legitimate non-racist word, but care should be taken because of its resemblance (in terms of spelling and phonetics) to a racial slur.

though, since you bring it up, the hegemony of the english language is something of a privilege, really. those of us born into it are generally much more privileged than those who aren't. but i think that's probably a different discussion.

How is it "racism enacted against them" to have a word that has no racial meaning said to them, and how are they reminded of being "worth less."

you seem to be taking my comment out of context. i was responding to your supposition that allegations of racism are just as bad as actual racism. my comment was an attempt to show that it's not because of the difference in effect on the victim of each act. i'm sorry if that was unclear.

What's that old quote about how nobody can make you feel worthless unless you let them?

i think eleanor roosevelt said that, didn't she? that's actually something i disagree with.

i'm not sure i agree with your assertion that false accusations demean real victims - i think partly because i take issue with the use of the word 'real' - but certainly they do make it difficult for victims of actual rape. then again, much damage can be done to the victims of false accusations of rape, even if no legal action is brought. they too must prove that their personal lives are above reproach. the two situations aren't really comparable, in my opinion.

When you scream racism over things that aren't racist, you diminish actual racism.

i don't think anyone is screaming, are they? i suppose it comes down to who the arbiter of racism is. if person 1 says to person 2, "what you just said was racist," and person 2 says, "no, it wasn't." who is correct? in this instance you are using the dictionary as the arbiter. but, as i've shown, even the dictionary makes allowances for racist interpretation and advises caution when using that particular word.

[dysprositos.livejournal.com]

So, what kind of "privilege" is it to correctly use the English language?

The kind of privilege where, when you hear someone say "niggardly," it doesn't for at least a moment sound like the kind of ugly racial slur you've heard hurled at you and your family. The kind where your right to use one particular semi-archaic word with a fairly narrow meaning and a lot of perfectly acceptable synonyms trumps the right of your listeners to not have to flinch when you speak.

It's one word. Why are you so attached to your ability to say this one word--one that hardly gets any use except in these discussions--when it would be so easy to excise it from your vocabulary, that you're willing to completely dismiss the feelings of everyone around you? Why is the word "niggardly" so important to you?

"Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent." Sure. Maybe. I don't know, I know I sure as hell have been made to feel inferior without my consent; I don't know how many times I've tried to make myself not care what the people around me thought about me. If only I could just stop caring--but that's my baggage to deal with. So, sure, it's on me to try to harden myself against the outside world.

But it's also on me to try to keep from making anyone else feel inferior. Y'know? Sure, I have to learn to deal with the fact that other people are going to be assholes, but if I want a less assholish world to deal with, I have to do my part to not be an asshole at other people. Right? Life's not fair, but let's don't make it less fair if we can do otherwise.

It's...accomodations. Nobody has to accomodate anyone else's problems. As a society, in fact, we put a lot of the burden on the people who are out of the norm for whatever reason to deal with it without the rest of us adjusting even a little bit to help. But...isn't it a good thing to clear a path through the crowd for the guy with the cane or crutches so he doesn't have to clear a path himself? Shouldn't we avoid setting off surprise firecrackers or noisemakers next to the woman dealing with combat-induced PTSD? Maybe avoid using the word "rape" in casual conversation around women who have to deal with the threat of it everyday (and maybe memories of it)?

And is it really that hard to not say one barely-used little word that sounds too much like one of the most powerfully hurtful words in the English language? Really?

[kita0610.livejournal.com]

Translation: my 'right' to use a word is more important than whether or not the word makes someone else feel like shit. I am more important than anyone else.

Censorship means someone telling you that you MAY NOT do something. This conversation has been about what we CHOOSE to do in order to make the community a better place. Given your contributions to this conversation, it isn't surprising what your choice is.

[kita0610.livejournal.com]

Having a great history of fighting racism or other -isms in your past doesn't exempt you from making racist or other -ist mistakes in your present. I wish that were the case, that once we make a decision to do the right thing, it always sticks. But we're human and we have to remind ourselves again and again what the right thing is.

People are telling you right NOW that what you're choosing to do is harmful and icky. But you continue to do it anyway. I'm not sure how you can justify that.

[kita0610.livejournal.com]

I understand what you think you're doing. But you're again talking about censorship. *No one* has advocated that. Not once. And the reason why you would choose NOT to use that word is what makes me wonder why you don't expend that energy working so other people CHOOSE not to use it too.

[chopchica.livejournal.com]

DON'T ARGUE WITH THEM, KITA, FOR THEY ARE SO WISE! MAYBE ONE DAY YOU WILL UNDERSTAND! BUT FOR NOW, THIS IS MY FINAL SAY ON THE SUBJECT! UNTIL I COME BACK TEN SECONDS LATER TO HAVE THE LAST WORD!

I love when people exhibit the fundamental disconnect of thinking that their right to free speech somehow protects them from somebody else using *their* free speech to tell them just how *stupid* they are.

[dysprositos.livejournal.com]

Oh, I understand. I'll fight tooth and nail for anyone's right to be an asshole, too (within reason). And I'll fight tooth and nail for everyone else's right to call people who are being assholes out on it.

You're perfectly welcome to "refuse to stop" using the word "niggardly" (and, um, if you've never used it in your life, why are you refusing to stop using it?) if you feel like. You just have to deal with the consequence of a lot of people around you thinking you're racist for it*, while some of your listeners have to deal with once again being hurt by someone else's choice of words.

Has anyone in this thread other than you even mentioned institutional action against people who use the word "niggardly"? 'Cos last I checked, "choosing not to use a certain word" and "choosing not to associate with someone who uses a certain word" and even "choosing to call people racist [correctly or incorrectly] because they use a certain word" were not the same things as censorship.

Speaking of using words correctly.

*Which, fair's fair, right? You're using a word that you know hurts other people because you don't care about their feelings, and we're using a word--racist--which we know hurts you because we don't care about your feelings!

[jennem.livejournal.com]

Censorship starts with one word.

Bzz. Wrong.

Censorship starts with the power to command. A minority telling a privileged person that using [blank] word is unnecessarily harmful cannot censor because said minority lacks the institutional, social, political, and cultural power to act as a censor.

P.S. Re-framing the discussion to be about censorship instead of icky words that hurt people = you showing your privilege.