The words [Equity-language] guides recommend or reject are sometimes exactly the same, justified in nearly identical language.
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Although the guides refer to language “evolving,” these changes are a revolution from above. They haven’t emerged organically from the shifting linguistic habits of large numbers of people.
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Prison does not become a less brutal place by calling someone locked up in one a person experiencing the criminal-justice system.
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The whole tendency of equity language is to blur the contours of hard, often unpleasant facts. This aversion to reality is its main appeal. Once you acquire the vocabulary, it’s actually easier to say people with limited financial resources than the poor.
The problem is really that you’re just putting a new coat of paint on things, you’re not actually solving the problem. This isn’t even a new idea, it has a long history where some term gets a negative connotation, usually for a variety of reasons only some of which are discriminatory, so someone comes up with a new term that everyone switches to using, but then those same negative connotations just migrate to that new term as well.
Look how many old historical terms there are for things with negative connotations. You’ve got unhoused, homeless, vagrant, bum, itinerant, drifter, wretch, tramp, hobo, beggar, vagabond, pauper, transient, urchin, panhandler, indigent, waif, ragamuffin, shirker, and that’s just for various ways to refer to a homeless person. You can repeat this exercise for pretty much anything else.
Instead of coming up with a new name that itself will be considered discriminatory in another decade, maybe we should spend the effort trying to stop people being discriminated against and improving peoples lives. Instead of trying to protect the feelings of homeless people, maybe we should be trying to make sure they actually have homes and are taken care of.
Now, all this is of course not talking about slurs, that is derogatory slang terms for some ethnic group that are intended to convey negative connotations. Those should rightfully not be tolerated.
That is the euphemism treadmill which is about changing a label for a specific thing/concept without actually changing what is being talked about. Switching from black to African-American is an example ofnthe treadmill. People of color, which also includes other non-white people is equity language because it is more inclusive and person first.
This is about trying to change the framing of discussions and labels to be more inclusive.
Yeah, and we switch back to black because not all black people are African American.
It is more complicated than picking a single label.
The original purpose of the term African American was to make a label for the descendants of black slaves that was more precise than ‘black’ because the distinction was relevant in the context of US society. As with any term, it eventually became less useful as people who didn’t understand the purpose used it to refer to more recent voluntary immigrants who also fall in the social category of black.
Person of color is similar, as some people prefer the more precise label of black. But ‘colored person’ is right out for general use because of how it is used by racists to point out the person’s skin color in place of them being a person. The NAACP is the exception since the group itself has retained the acronym and have essentially reclaimed the term in the context of their association’s name.
Ultimately the most important thing is to avoid the labels unless they are relevant and always put the person first before the label.