Scott Alexander is wrong about slurs
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It isn't true that Scott's post doesn't say why he thinks it's bad (all else being equal) for the implications of words to shift in the way he describes.
Okay, but this process is bad, right?
Suppose someone decides tomorrow that “Asian” is a slur, and demands we call them “person of Asian descent”. Everyone agrees to go along with this for some reason, and fine, “Asian” is now a slur.
This seems bad for everybody. White people have to be on tenterhooks every time they talk to an Asian, trying their hardest to restrain from using the word they’re familiar with, and to remember the unwieldy gibberish that replaces it. If they fail, they have to feel bad, or worry that the local Asian community thinks they’re a racist. Meanwhile, Asians now have to police everyone else’s behavior, saying “Actually, that word is offensive, we prefer ‘person of Asian descent’” every time someone refers to them. When people get annoyed by this, they have to fret that the person is actually racist against them and trying to deliberately offend them. If they are the sort of person who is triggered by hearing slurs, they will have to be triggered several times a day as people adjust from the familiar language to the new. Meanwhile, dozens of organizations with names like the National Asian Alliance, Asian Community Center, or Asians For Biden will have to change their names. Old novels will need to include forewords apologizing for how in the old days people used to use insensitive terms, and we’re sorry we’re making you read a book with the word A***n in it. Some old people will refuse to change and get ostracized by society. This is just a bad time time on all sides.
Also, "it's important not to change the words we use to refer to minority groups" isn't what Scott is saying.
There's a difference between "labels should never change" (which you say Scott is saying, but he isn't) and "the thing where a previously harmless label becomes offensive, not because it was really offensive all along, but because someone has decided to try to make it offensive and then there's a positive feedback loop, generally does more harm than good" (which he is saying).
Personally, I would want to distinguish between three variants of the "hyperstitious slur cascade". (1) A word starts being used with hostile intent, which triggers the cascade. (Think "spastic".) (2) Some other word starts being specifically favoured by the target group, so that all other words start to be used disproportionately by the hostile and prejudiced, which triggers the cascade. (If Scott's account of the history is correct, then "Negro" is somewhere intermediate between 1 and 2. I don't have a really clear-cut example of 2 to hand.) (3) Someone decides, for no very good reason, to start being offended by a word. (Think "field work", though I don't think the people who claimed that that term was offensive were actually successful in starting a hyperstition cascade.)
I would switch very early in a type-1 cascade, but later in a type-3 cascade. Type 2 is somewhere in between.
There's a difference between "labels should never change" (which you say Scott is saying, but he isn't) and "the thing where a previously harmless label becomes offensive, not because it was really offensive all along, but because someone has decided to try to make it offensive and then there's a positive feedback loop, generally does more harm than good" (which he is saying).
Per (4) in the OP, I think this process that Scott describes is simply an incorrect model of why some words for minority groups come to be seen as derogatory and why the acceptable words change. His account of how the label "Black" was popularized, for example, just seems factually incorrect from what I can glean from some cursory reading online.
My own cursory reading mostly leaves me aware that I don't really know a lot of important things about how the process happened.
It seems clearly correct that before about 1966 pretty much everyone, of every race and political persuasion, was using "Negro" as the default term. Scott says "fifty years ago" and I think he must have meant sixty (50 years ago was 1973, by which time the process was mostly complete) but otherwise I think he's plainly right about this.
It seems generally agreed that Stokely Carmichael / Kwame Ture was the key mover in getting "Negro" toppled and "black" replacing it, and that this process started in 1966 with his famous "Black Power" speech (in which I don't think he makes any particular argument about "black" versus "Negro", but he uses "black" throughout).
In his book, SC/KT claims that "there is a growing resentment" of the term "Negro". Maybe that was true and he was more a symptom than a cause of the shift in preferences. Or maybe he just said it for the same reason as Donald Trump loves to say "a lot of people are saying ...".
It's hard to tell what the actual mechanism was. It must have been some combination of (1) people being convinced by SC/KT's arguments that the term "Negro" was "the invention of our oppressor" and therefore describes "_his_ image of us", and that "black" is therefore better; (2) black people trying out "black" and, separately from any arguments about the theoretical merits, just liking it better than "negro"; (3) people just imitating other people because that's a thing people do; (4) white people switching to "black" because (in reality and/or their perception) black people preferred it; (5a) people wanting to use a term that was increasingly a signifier of being in favour of social justice and civil rights; and (5b) people not wanting to use a term that was increasingly a signifier of not being in favour of social justice and civil rights.
Scott's post is about both branches of mechanism 5. It's hard for the process to get started that way. (There can't be much social pressure to use term X rather than term Y if hardly anyone is using term Y yet. You could get a situation where the use of Y begins within some small but influential group, and takes over larger and larger groups by mechanism 5a and then 5b. But I doubt that's common.) I don't think it can avoid finishing that way. (Consider the situation now. If someone showed me an incredibly persuasive argument that "negro" was really a much better term to use for black people than "black", I almost certainly wouldn't start using it however convinced I was, because if I did I would immediately be branded a racist. That's mechanism 5b.)
So. I assume the negro->black switch got started by mechanism 1 (that being the one that works most effectively before there are a bunch of people already using the new term) and then continued by some combination of all the mechanisms, with an increasing amount of 5b in the mix as the transition proceeded.
... Which leaves so many questions whose answers are (I think) unclear.
- Was the process in this case a bad thing overall, as we should probably expect on Scott's model? (Bad: risk of mis-classifying people as racist whose only sin was not to adjust their language quickly enough; inconvenience during the transition; awkwardness after the transition of reading material written before it. Good: morale-boosting effects on black people of feeling that they were using a term of their own choosing and taking more control of their own destiny; if SC/KT was correct about "negro" bringing along unwanted associations etc., then some degree of escape from those associations.)
- Was there actually anything to SC/KT's claim that the term "negro" was more "the invention of our oppressor" than "black", or his suggestion that using "black" was a way of escaping unwelcome and unfair stereotypes? (My guess, and I think also Scott's, is no to both. But I could easily be wrong. And of course if a community has internalized hostile stereotyping, there's value in anything that feels like a reason to discard that, even if in some theoretical sense it isn't a very good reason.)
- Was the negro->black switch actually brought about by SC/KT, as commonly believed? Or did SC/KT merely draw attention to something that was happening anyway (and maybe make it happen faster, but not change whether it happened)?
- How much of the process was driven by mechanisms 5a and 5b, which Scott treats as the main drivers, versus mechanisms 1-4?
- When Scott says that SC/KT picked "black" in the hope of scaring white people, is that correct at all? (I suspect that the phrase black power may have been picked with that intention, but not the word black itself, and wonder whether Scott may have misunderstood something; but I have no evidence either way.)
I haven't seen -- but, again, my reading too has been pretty cursory -- anything that answers these, and depending on the answers my opinion could be anywhere from "Scott's account is basically correct, although there are a few inaccuracies and I don't much like the tone of some of it" to "Scott's account isn't 100% wrong but the mechanism he says was the most important one was actually only relevant in the mopping-up phase once the shift had basically happened by other mechanisms, and his reasons for not wanting to go along with a 'hyperstitious slur cascade' basically don't apply here".
If your reading has turned up things that clarify some of those points, I'd be interested.
I think this is the crux of the matter:
Was the process in this case a bad thing overall, as we should probably expect on Scott's model? (Bad: risk of mis-classifying people as racist whose only sin was not to adjust their language quickly enough; inconvenience during the transition; awkwardness after the transition of reading material written before it. Good: morale-boosting effects on black people of feeling that they were using a term of their own choosing and taking more control of their own destiny; if SC/KT was correct about "negro" bringing along unwanted associations etc., then some degree of escape from those associations.)
My contention is that changing the words we use for minority groups is not a bad thing overall because the costs are low and the benefits are high. This is what the OP attempted to establish with points (1) through (4).
(I elaborated more in a separate comment.)
I don't think Scott ever claims that changing the words we use for minority groups is a bad thing overall.
His post is not only about changing the words for minority groups, and he explicitly says that the sort of change he's talking about sometimes happens for excellent reasons (he gives the example of how "Jap" became offensive in the 1950s).
It would be much more helpful if Scott used a real example rather than a fictional one. I don't think his fictional example is very realistic.
A nitpick. You say
English as spoken 500 years ago is incomprehensible gibberish to English speakers today.
It really isn't. Here's the opening of Thomas More's "Dialogue concerning Tyndale" (also called the "Dialogue concerning Heresies"), written in 1528. I've transcribed it as best I can from an old edition (set in blackletter type) to make sure I'm getting the original text rather than some modern editor's attempt to tidy it up.
It is an olde said law, that one busynes begetteth & bryngeth forth another. Whichever be as it happeth I find very trewe by my self, which have been fayne by occasion, first of one busynes, after to take the second, and upon the second, now to take the thirde.
This is not incomprehensible gibberish! The spellynge is a bit antiquated, and there are a few words some modern readers might not recognize (e.g., fayne = fain ~= inclined), but I find the meaning perfectly clear.
(Obviously this doesn't invalidate the point that every language is constantly changing and we should expect words' meanings to shift.)
There is a difference between normal language evolution and forced changes as a tactic in the post-modern power struggle game. These are usually signaled by the fact they are strongly advocated by a small minority of activists, often not even of the group affected. They are at best generally used to signal allegiance to a certain in-group and "other" less enlightened people. Examples are the term "Latinx" which most Hispanic people dislike. Attempts to rename the homeless a "unhoused" or "people experiencing homelessness" are also noted.
The word "Jew" has existed in one form or another for thousands of years and is still completely accepted in contemporary English.
"Jew" is the classic example of something that shouldn't be offensive, but tends to be used aggressively, so people who don't want to be aggressive use a longer form ("Jewish person"). If someone in the US uses the word Jew and they're not obviously Jewish, they sound antisemitic.
If someone in the US uses the word Jew and they're not obviously Jewish, they sound antisemitic.
This seems not universal and highly context-dependent.
I can't tell if you're saying "this is completely and horribly incorrect in approach and model", or if you're saying "yeah, there are cases where imposed rapid change is harmful, but there's nuance I'd like to point out". I disagree with the former, and don't see the latter very clearly in the text.
The title of Scott's post (give up 70 percent of the way through) seems about right to me, and skimming over the post, it seems he's mostly talking about extreme, rapid, politically-motivated changes. I agree with him that it's concerning, and the vigor with which many people NOT in the victim group demand the change is somewhere between incomprehensible and horrifying (in that I'm personally judged for not following the trends closely enough, and not changing long linguistic habits quickly enough).
Your argument seems to be that change is inevitable and proper, but I don't think Scott's claiming otherwise.
it seems like you each have reasonable mottes, and overlapping baileys. I find Scott to be more specific in examples of changes that worry him, than you in examples of change where you support and Scott doesn't. Honestly, saying his examples ("asian" and "field work") are worse than yours ("black" and "gay") is very close to strawman arguing.
Out of the two options, this is closer to my view:
"this is completely and horribly incorrect in approach and model"
I think Scott’s model of how changes in the words we use for minority groups happen is just factually inaccurate and unrealistic. Changes are generally slow, gradual, long-lasting, and are primarily advocated for in good faith by conscientious members of the minority group in question.
Honestly, saying his examples ("asian" and "field work") are worse than yours ("black" and "gay") is very close to strawman arguing.
Well, my examples are both real and non-fringe, whereas "Asian" and "field work" are fictional and fringe, respectively. So, I think "gay" and "Black" are more central examples.
Scott also seems annoyed by "Black", but doesn't explain why he's (seemingly) annoyed.
There's a bit more here than I can readily respond to right now, but let me know if you think I've avoided the crux of the matter and you'd like me to address it in a future comment.
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.
1The 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.)
1The 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.
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