>>> Hey, here's a thought. Why not think about this from some other position
than male white privilege?
Thankfully that's exactly what I was trying to do, to get people to first
think about the actual language involved instead of first thinking of racial
implications. My point was that it's important for people to actually
understand the language that we speak, since that will be better for all of
us in the long run. Specifically in this case, understanding the language
has the potential to eliminate or at least reduce the discomfort that you
mention over these terms. As you say, this was an opportunity, and I took it
as such.
This is somewhat reminiscent of objections to the word "history" as being
sexist. Of course, the derivations of "history" and the masculine possessive
pronoun "his" are entirely different, and the fact that one is contained in
the other is entirely a coincidence. Yes, there are probably other words one
could substitute for "history", but since the sexism claim is baseless, why
would we do this just because a few people request it? Isn't it better to
educate those people and try to eliminate their discomfort with the word?
And I hope I don't need to say that this is clearly different than objecting
to truly discriminatory terms. (I'll refrain from examples.) There's no
question we should be ridding ourselves of those usages.
|
