clutter

jwisser:

yoisthisracist:

Yo, tell your racist friend that that usage has been wholly co-opted by racists, so he needs to chill.

Here is another thing I would like to hear other people’s thoughts on.

My personal feeling is that avoiding the use of the word “people”—e.g., “blacks” for “black people”, “whites” for “white people”—makes it easier to forget that you are, in fact, talking about people, regardless of minority or majority status. On the other hand, saying “Christian people” rather than “Christians” or the like every time you refer to a demographic begins to sound silly rather quickly, and at present I don’t always do it.

It’s hard for me to see a difference between these situations beyond the fact that one is a non-standard usage; am I missing something here? What do you think about this?

So I just did a quick little thought experiment in which I tested some terms out in my head to see which ones made me wince and which ones seem sort of ridiculous. (Okay, soooo not scientific, but since I’m trying to examine my own behavior/preferences it seems like a good place to start.)

While, in general, I completely agree that I prefer to use the word “people” to emphasize that we are, in fact, talking about people, I found that I was IN GENERAL more comfortable using the demographic shorthand when talking about:

- majority/privileged groups

- groups of which I am a member

In other words, I don’t wince internally at the use of the word “whites” or “Christians.” Though I do wince at the use of “blacks” or “Jews,” probably because the cultural baggage associated with referring to members of groups using those terms specifically is so fraught with history of not just prejudice, but also overt and institutionalized acts of brutality on the basis of membership in those groups.

Interestingly (and inconsistently),  I don’t seem to have a problem with “Muslims” as a term applied to adherents of Islam, and I’m not sure why that is. Maybe because our culture’s specific problems with anti-Muslim prejudice are relatively recent? 

I think, though, that my discomfort with certain ways of referring to particular demographic groups lessens with context. Like, if I am discussing research that breaks people out into demographic groups, I might use “_____ people” on first reference, but then just use the adjectival shorthand for subsequent references once I am satisfied that we’re all just talking about some statistics and the conversation is not about to take some horribly bigoted turn.

tl;dr I don’t know, Jonas, but I find this question as confusing as you do.