George Packer is kind of right about equity language guides.
George Packer is kind of right about equity language guides.
...Did I just agree with one of the "cancel culture" crusaders?
George Packer has a new essay in The Atlantic, “The Moral Case Against Equity Language.” It caught my eye because his chief example is the Sierra Club’s Equity Language Guide.
(If you repeat the phrases “strategic political communication” and “Sierra Club” three times, I appear. Just like Beetlejuice.)
Here’s Packer’s introduction:
The Sierra Club’s Equity Language Guide discourages using the words stand, Americans, blind, and crazy. The first two fail at inclusion, because not everyone can stand and not everyone living in this country is a citizen. The third and fourth, even as figures of speech (“Legislators are blind to climate change”), are insulting to the disabled. The guide also rejects the disabled in favor of people living with disabilities, for the same reason that enslaved person has generally replaced slave : to affirm, by the tenets of what’s called “people-first language,” that “everyone is first and foremost a person, not their disability or other identity.”
The guide’s purpose is not just to make sure that the Sierra Club avoids obviously derogatory terms, such as welfare queen. It seeks to cleanse language of any trace of privilege, hierarchy, bias, or exclusion. In its zeal, the Sierra Club has clear-cut a whole national park of words. Urban, vibrant, hardworking, and brown bag all crash to earth for subtle racism. Y’all supplants the patriarchal you guys, and elevate voices replaces empower, which used to be uplifting but is now condescending. The poor is classist; battle and minefield disrespect veterans; depressing appropriates a disability; migrant—no explanation, it just has to go.
I think Packer essentially conflates two arguments here. The first is a retread of the standard old-man-yelling-at-clouds complaint about cancel culture.
I have no patience for this argument anymore. Plenty of people have already written definitive critiques. Read Michael Hobbes, or Parker Molloy, or Thomas Zimmer, or literally dozens of other authors who routinely dispense with this line of argumentation. There isn’t much more to say on the matter. It’s 2023. Republican state governments are literally banning books and attempting to outlaw trans lives. If you think the biggest threats to civil society come from diversity and inclusion seminars, then you’re kind of telling on yourself.
But the second argument has a different texture. It’s an argument about effective strategic communication. Packer, narrowly read, is saying “take a look at this style guide. It’s a mess. It is demanding that well-meaning political advocates become awful communicators. That’s bad. It runs counter to so many rules of good writing.”
And I’ve gotta say, I find myself aggressively agreeing with that sentiment.
Patriotism strikes me as the most obvious example. Should progressive advocacy organizations use language that is overtly patriotic, stressing how their values are American values and connecting their cause to a moments in history that are broadly celebrated?
Yes. Yes they should. Duh.
They should do so because it is effective. They should do so because ceding patriotism to your opponents is a mistake. Conservative media personalities are eager to insist that progressives are ashamed to even use the word “American.” Why would a mainstream progressive political organization go out of its way to agree with them?
This ought to be obvious. If it isn’t obvious, that’s a sign that you’ve spent too much time in committee meetings and lost your bearings.
[I suppose I should note here that I haven’t had much involvement with the Sierra Club in recent years. I served on the organization’s Board of Directors from 2004-2010, and was part of the Sierra Student Coalition’s national leadership from 1997-2002. All of my practical political insights came from the organization. It’s where I learned organizing, and where I developed my pedagogy. I devoted my teens and twenties attending far too many Sierra Club committee meetings. There were times when I surely lost my bearings.]
Leafing through the organization’s style guide, what strikes me is the overwhelming number of commonplace turns of phrase that have been rendered problematic:
Don’t say “rule of thumb” or “stand for [some principle].” Replace “classy,” “empower,” and “retirement” with more inclusive language. And, naturally, avoid words like “minefield” and “smoking gun.”
That’s… a lot. Too much, I think. It leaves me with the general impression that one should never use two words when five might suffice. Proceed with the utmost caution when using imagery or metaphors that clearly communicate your ideas.
This isn’t some grand threat to democracy or civil society. But it’s a self-imposed disadvantage for the political organizations whose causes I support. And I think they should know better. They certainly taught me better than this.
There is an underlying theory-of-change at work here. The basic logic is as follows: (1) Language that excludes potential allies weakens your political movement. (2) the environmental movement needs to be stronger in order to accomplish its goals. (3) the American environmental movement in particular has historically been a well-off-white-people’s movement. Today’s movement leaders need to hold themselves accountable for this legacy if they are to build the trust and relationships necessary for a stronger movement.
I get that reasoning. The basic insight is just “don’t needlessly alienate potential allies. Also, recognize that language changes over time. Stay aware of that and adjust accordingly.” That’s simple enough on the individual level.
But apply it to the communication routines of a large organization with hundreds of staff and thousands of volunteer leaders, and you’re left with a huge mess. You end up creating a culture that focuses on avoiding language that might offend allies, instead of focusing on clearly communicating your message to your target audience. The result is impenetrable, jargon-filled committee-speak.
Even worse, it can end up being deeply counterproductive to your actual goals. It is a gift to your opponents, who will make you out to be out-of-touch elitists and “hall monitors.” The work of challenging the power structure and securing meaningful victories is hard enough. Try not to give rhetorical gifts to your opponents.
I might just be old-school. I still teach Saul Alinsky in my strategic political communication classes (and Schattschneider. Always Schattschneider). I believe in analyzing the power structure for vulnerabilities, and designing campaigns that mobilize people to pressure powerful elites to do things they wouldn’t otherwise do. I think political activists should speak clearly and plainly, in ways that demonstrate how reasonable our demands are and how ridiculous the status quo is.
This isn’t as easy as it sounds. It takes years of practice. And the stakes are high.
I’m not worried that these Equity Language Guides are evidence of cancel culture run amok. But I’m a little worried that they will tend to make political advocates’ language more impenetrable.
Write well. Speak in ways that connect with and move your audience. Communicate clearly, vividly, and with purpose. Yes, evaluate how language is changing. Don’t needlessly offend or pick fights over changing language norms. But your North Star should be winning worthwhile fights. Don’t make the work of social change harder than it already is.
This is the line that really matters here.
"Cancel culture" isn't the issue. The issue is first that the origin story of this kind of attention to language is an ungrounded runaway train version of poststructuralist/crit theory focus on language's constitutive power. The old idea of the liberal subject who has thoughts that are then expressed though language where the idea preceded speaking has been pushed out by both cognitive science and by critical theory (in different ways), and the replacement proposition on the critical theory side was (loosely speaking) that language IS thought, and thus that language CONSTITUTES consciousness, subjectivity, society. When that view seeped into activism and became instrumentalized, it led to the commandment, "Seek ye first the semantic kingdom" as the road to political transformation--that if you could get people to speak differently you'd change how they thought and if you changed how they thought you'd change the social structures that their thought was maintaining.
That was a dramatic overestimation of what change in language can accomplish. But it also hid what you (and Packer) are pointing to here, which is that this move amounted to--intentionally or otherwise--a bid for social power by people who believed they were able to see the causality of semantics from somewhere up and above the lived experience of speaking and writing, that they could identify accurately the work that particular words, phrases, discourses were performing in the maintenance of inequality, hierarchy and discrimination and they could identify accurately the replacement words and phrases that would remove that maintenance. That isn't just empirically incorrect; it also essentially enthrones a kind of master-class of hidden editors and their messengers who assert that they need to be given authority over communication and representation because they're the only ones with the proper education and training to identify bad communications and to create good ones.
As a political move, that's just a disaster: it's created enormous resentment even among people who are strongly inclined to support social transformation. It not only gets us caught up in essentially trivial struggles within organizations and between them, but it often ends up in the painful farce of a highly educated progressive telling the kind of person that he/she putatively wants to liberate that they're using the wrong word--e.g., someone who absolutely embodies the meaning of the idea of intersectionality in their experience and situation being scolded that they should be using the word "intersectionality".
The intricate business of moving the culture forward towards new power sharing arrangements involves language cultivation. And perhaps cultivating intestinal fortitude to withstand all the pettiness and raw bullshit that’s part and parcel with the larger progressive changes we seek. These moves are ANNOYING sometimes unintentionally fully (Herstory instead of History comes to mind but seldom is the linguistic tango truly sinister. (Seldom not never. For instance I find the use of the word “Democrat” in the mouths of Revivalist QAnonists lately quite sinister - “Democrat” in this context having rather the opposite meaning to what is offered in Merriam Webster).
I work in local government and have for decades. I’ve gone to more equity training and inclusion seminars and trainings in those years that the course work may now exceed my college curriculum. Some of it is laughable and there is the tendency towards reductionism and gadget level Utopianism (“if you can just get the pronouns right we will all live in harmony!”). Some of it may be misguided some of it laughable but dangerous? I’m still intellectually free to go about my business at work. When I say “circle the wagons” no one is writing me up for HR. Where does that happen ? In organiZations that are already losing some element of there “base” - whether it’s that the charismatic founder left with no provision for a decent successor to organizations which got complacent with their missions or largely accomplished them and wanted to stay in business. That’s when we get stuck in the petty disputes and disagreements around specific forms of language.
In healthier contexts GRACE is REQUIRED for lasting social change. I’m tired of the critique that doesn’t acknowledge the real challenges of social change and gets stuck in these debates over. quotidian mannerisms