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Towards a Politics of Awkward Language
In response to this here.
I think it's worthwhile to avoid inferring any real political project to Pullum's article - at least one having much to do with race. There is, I suppose, a certain politics to insisting that prescriptive linguistics is hogwash and we all should be encouraged to follow our own sense of aesthetics, as long as we do so thoughtfully and with sensitivity. (And I do think that he implied, and demonstrated, that those qualifiers are important to him.)
But beyond syntactic anti-authoritarianism, it didn't seem like a particularly political piece. He used a politically racy piece of language as an object to work out his logic on. Whether that sort of exercise is appealing to you is another sort of aesthetic preference, too.
Yes, he does miss the boat about the ways that whiteness and non-whiteness have been strategically constructed and deployed, cemented and contested, over the last few centuries. That doesn't seem to stop him from engaging with anti-racist issues in institutional settings - though there may be an opportunity for him to improve his praxis by clearing up some of that confusion.
Him missing that particular boat would be more important to me in a piece with a more intense (or just different) political intervention - or one that didn't frame itself in the first sentence as idiosyncratic, personal, aesthetic, preference, etc.
Given all that, I kind of liked it - but then again, I am openly nerd-identified.
To get at the politics that don't quite make it into Pullum's piece:
What is there to gain by prescribing specific anti-racist language? Beyond an Intro to Anti-Oppression conversation, or in self-defense, I don't think that there is a whole lot to gain. The ethical (anti-oppression) prescriptions I go by are general, and necessarily not about particular words. They are, in order of importance:
(1) Call people how they want to be called.
(2) Be tactical.
(3) Change patterns.
How this plays out is that I alternately refer to: white folks, the European diaspora, beneficiaries of white supremacy, people who are marked as white, and the minority caste (though that overlaps with class categories) on one hand; and then to POC, people targeted by racism, insert-preferred-identifier folks, victims of white supremacy, and the majority castes, on the other.
Yes, most of those are awkward as hell. And, I happen to think that awkward language is desirable. There is a point of view that sees language - easy, familiar language - as the strong arm of the status quo. Our tendency to rely on what we already know, and understand thoroughly, acts as a relentless conservative drag on our efforts to make new (kinds of) relationships. Certainly for me, as someone trained in whiteness, I've begun to see that white supremacy is something that is woven - subtly, overtly, and thoroughly - through the language with which I perceive the world. Departing from the path laid out for me requires a break with what is familiar, with what comes naturally and flows elegantly.
And I don't think that this is true just for those of us trained as oppressors, and I don't think that it is true only of white supremacy. I think that the whole social order, with it's myriad of criteria for the allocation of power and freedom, is maintained - not only through violence and its threat - but through the terrible inertia of easy language. Witness how the fierce resistance of conservatives to adopt the preferred identifiers of non-white (or otherwise locally non-dominant) groups reflects and coordinates their resistance against actually flattening hierarchies and sharing resources.
So Pullum's playful, yet curiously high-stakes, exercise doesn't make much in the way of a political point. He flirts with a potentially radical stance: Fight the power of linguistic authoritarians, and fight white supremacy too. And to the degree that this describes his position, I salute him (even as he has his own lessons to learn about whiteness, as do I). But he ultimately fails to find the potential connection between those two kinds of power, and the resistance they require. Alas, his justification for the "idiosyncratic" use of language comes down to a dislike for awkwardness, a preference for elegant syntax. And that, I argue, gets us nowhere but right here.
What about this, as an alternative:
* White supremacy and linguistic authority are related. The dominant language coordinates the relationships of domination.
* To create desirable alternatives, we need to create new language to coordinate new relationships.
* This language, in opposition to all our training, will necessarily be awkward and strange (at least at first). This is OK - in fact it's a good sign, because our training to dislike new, awkward language is a basic part of how the social system maintains itself in language.
Please note - I am not suggesting that changing our language is enough. When white folks use the phrase "people of color," it is probably sometimes a useful marker for people targeted by racism to know that there might be a potential ally, or friendly person, around. In many contexts I'm sure it fails in that regard. What I am saying is this: the tools that we need to make substantive change will come to us in language, or we will invent them ourselves out of language, and if we let our easy preference for what "flows" dictate the language we use, we are hobbling ourselves. In any project that is intended to make a something happen that isn't supported by the dominant institutions of our society, we will need all the love for the new and inelegant that we can muster.
Viva la Awkward!
I think it's worthwhile to avoid inferring any real political project to Pullum's article - at least one having much to do with race. There is, I suppose, a certain politics to insisting that prescriptive linguistics is hogwash and we all should be encouraged to follow our own sense of aesthetics, as long as we do so thoughtfully and with sensitivity. (And I do think that he implied, and demonstrated, that those qualifiers are important to him.)
But beyond syntactic anti-authoritarianism, it didn't seem like a particularly political piece. He used a politically racy piece of language as an object to work out his logic on. Whether that sort of exercise is appealing to you is another sort of aesthetic preference, too.
Yes, he does miss the boat about the ways that whiteness and non-whiteness have been strategically constructed and deployed, cemented and contested, over the last few centuries. That doesn't seem to stop him from engaging with anti-racist issues in institutional settings - though there may be an opportunity for him to improve his praxis by clearing up some of that confusion.
Him missing that particular boat would be more important to me in a piece with a more intense (or just different) political intervention - or one that didn't frame itself in the first sentence as idiosyncratic, personal, aesthetic, preference, etc.
Given all that, I kind of liked it - but then again, I am openly nerd-identified.
To get at the politics that don't quite make it into Pullum's piece:
What is there to gain by prescribing specific anti-racist language? Beyond an Intro to Anti-Oppression conversation, or in self-defense, I don't think that there is a whole lot to gain. The ethical (anti-oppression) prescriptions I go by are general, and necessarily not about particular words. They are, in order of importance:
(1) Call people how they want to be called.
(2) Be tactical.
(3) Change patterns.
How this plays out is that I alternately refer to: white folks, the European diaspora, beneficiaries of white supremacy, people who are marked as white, and the minority caste (though that overlaps with class categories) on one hand; and then to POC, people targeted by racism, insert-preferred-identifier folks, victims of white supremacy, and the majority castes, on the other.
Yes, most of those are awkward as hell. And, I happen to think that awkward language is desirable. There is a point of view that sees language - easy, familiar language - as the strong arm of the status quo. Our tendency to rely on what we already know, and understand thoroughly, acts as a relentless conservative drag on our efforts to make new (kinds of) relationships. Certainly for me, as someone trained in whiteness, I've begun to see that white supremacy is something that is woven - subtly, overtly, and thoroughly - through the language with which I perceive the world. Departing from the path laid out for me requires a break with what is familiar, with what comes naturally and flows elegantly.
And I don't think that this is true just for those of us trained as oppressors, and I don't think that it is true only of white supremacy. I think that the whole social order, with it's myriad of criteria for the allocation of power and freedom, is maintained - not only through violence and its threat - but through the terrible inertia of easy language. Witness how the fierce resistance of conservatives to adopt the preferred identifiers of non-white (or otherwise locally non-dominant) groups reflects and coordinates their resistance against actually flattening hierarchies and sharing resources.
So Pullum's playful, yet curiously high-stakes, exercise doesn't make much in the way of a political point. He flirts with a potentially radical stance: Fight the power of linguistic authoritarians, and fight white supremacy too. And to the degree that this describes his position, I salute him (even as he has his own lessons to learn about whiteness, as do I). But he ultimately fails to find the potential connection between those two kinds of power, and the resistance they require. Alas, his justification for the "idiosyncratic" use of language comes down to a dislike for awkwardness, a preference for elegant syntax. And that, I argue, gets us nowhere but right here.
What about this, as an alternative:
* White supremacy and linguistic authority are related. The dominant language coordinates the relationships of domination.
* To create desirable alternatives, we need to create new language to coordinate new relationships.
* This language, in opposition to all our training, will necessarily be awkward and strange (at least at first). This is OK - in fact it's a good sign, because our training to dislike new, awkward language is a basic part of how the social system maintains itself in language.
Please note - I am not suggesting that changing our language is enough. When white folks use the phrase "people of color," it is probably sometimes a useful marker for people targeted by racism to know that there might be a potential ally, or friendly person, around. In many contexts I'm sure it fails in that regard. What I am saying is this: the tools that we need to make substantive change will come to us in language, or we will invent them ourselves out of language, and if we let our easy preference for what "flows" dictate the language we use, we are hobbling ourselves. In any project that is intended to make a something happen that isn't supported by the dominant institutions of our society, we will need all the love for the new and inelegant that we can muster.
Viva la Awkward!
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