melanoman

In case you haven't heard, the Iroquois National Lacrosse team is being denied travel rights to England by the UK ministries. The team is ranked 4th in the world, and is a huge source of pride from the nation where the game was invented. The coverage I'm hearing on NPR keeps referring to the "special passports" the team members hold. I can't stand that term. When they say "special" they don't mean that the thing is made of some special material. The "special" part is that a tribal government is issuing them.

The travel problems started in La Guardia (a New York, USA airport) where the officials there had trouble validating the passports. The consultations went all the to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who NPR reported gave "special" permission for the Iroquois to use their passports. The UK ministries did not allow the passports in Heathrow, so the team was turned back and missed their first match. The host team England won that match by denying its rival admission to the match.

The Haudenosaunee Nation (which includes the Iroquois, Mohawk, and other tribes) has been issuing these passports since the 1970s and continues to upgrade to the evolving anti-fraud standards. Other hosts have honored the passports, which is how the team managed it's 4th-place world ranking. In practice, the big difference between the Iroquois passports and those of the US and Canada is inclusion in an anti-fraud database controlled by the United Nations. The Nation has expended over US$1.5 million to upgrade to the latest anti-fraud technologies, so at this point the difference is in international recognition, not the physical documents. England was party to a treaty with the Nation in the 18th century that allowed them travel rights, but isn't living up to that agreement now, even though Canadian transport on many Haudenosaunee roads is still permitted because of that treaty.

I'd like to see the governing body for lacrosse refuse to recognize the UK as a potential host until the UK recognizes the travel rights of the league's most senior member.

The term "persons of diversity" came up in the Language Log. It's a newly coined lexical item used to mean "people belonging to groups that were historically excluded [from X]" where X is drawn from the context but is always something where inclusion is socio-economically desirable. This coinage is super-new, but will probably catch on in American Boardroom Dialects for technical linguistic reasons that I don't want to go into here.

What I did want to talk about was that the early comments on the subject were overwhelmingly looking to deny the existence of the term. The comments felt... out of character for the board. It nagged me until I realized that this felt just like the Tone Argument. I wrote this comment about that:

At the risk of going off-topic for the log, strong reactions to terms that come up addressing racism are common, so much so that most discussion groups dedicated to analyzing, addressing, or otherwise discussing racism have coined the term "the tone argument" to refer to a way-too-common tactic of derailing the discussion. The derailer will talk about terms and politeness to shift blame for his or her own discomfort onto the person pointing out the uncomfortable truth.

The tone argument can't be accommodated. Begrudging members of the discussion aren't really objecting to the words, but to the very idea that they need to do something about the unfair advantages or even that those unfair advantages exist.

Even though the attempts are in vain, people in those discussions will and do try to accommodate the inconsolable. Trying to say something when someone is trying to squelch the idea is inherently broken. They end up coining increasingly opaque terms, which is where monstrosities like this really come from.

The annoying part of all that is that by arguing for the plainer terms instead of the obfuscated ones, that just adds to the distraction from the core argument.

Just to be clear, I'm not saying discussion of the terms nor GKP's reaction are at all out of bounds nor objectionable. This is the Language Log, so the discussion of terms is core to the purpose of this forum. "The tone argument" is about squelching people in other forums by changing the topic from the subject matter to the expression thereof.

I was satisfied with my analysis of the subject, but that disclaimer at the end bugs me. The social pressure got me to specifically exempt Dr. Pullum, and in doing so I took the edge off raising the question fully. I wonder if anyone in the forum will get the connection between trying to reinterpret the semantics of the new lexical item and the tone argument itself. I think I managed to get the worst of both worlds where I will pay the social price for touching on the taboo point, but without actually getting that point across. Damn.

This post is an academic investigation into how framing works with respect to racial pejoratives. In particular, I'm interested in exploring the boundaries of when a racial term draws in other racial ideas versus when it stands alone. By the very nature of this discussion, some offensive terms will get examined --- so offensive that I feel the need to make a disclaimer that I do not condone the use of these terms and that I am committed to the elimination of racism to the extent that this is possible. I suspect that this post will be too technical to be of much practical use in fighting racism, but I'd be thrilled to be proved wrong on that point.

The post was inspired by a stoneself post on the meaning of the term "white trash." The term "white trash" started out as a pejorative term coined by 19th century black americans to identify a radial group off the category "white." The term at once associated the identified group with "white" (i.e. they had white skin) but also differentiated them from the prototypical "white." The modern term is still a radial term off the "white" group, though the exact distinction being made has changed somewhat and the speaker base has broadened to include non-black speaker. In both cases the differentiation is pejorative and involves behavioral, social, and economic factors. The specifics of the distinguishing factors are beyond the scope of this paper, except for their pejorative nature.

Radial terms of this sort exclude the newly identified group from the original one. The naive definition of "white" --- a person with relatively low melanin content in their skin with caucasian ancestry --- would include "white trash" as "white," but the usage of this term focuses much more on the distinction than the similarity. More simply, when a person is called "white trash" the emphasis is that this person does not fit the prototypical image the speaker has of white people.

All pejoratives, by their nature, make a negative judgment against an identified individual or group. A second distinction can be drawn between pejoratives that make a judgment and pejoratives that express a prejudice.

An example of a pejorative that makes a judgment about an individual would be the term "jerk." When someone calls a person a "jerk" the emphasis is directly on the quality and/or behavior of that person and doesn't much consider the association of that person with anyone else. Words of this type range from very mild terms like "slacker" to vulgar ones like "asshole." Some are very specific about what sort of judgment is being made, such as "slacker" referring to work ethic, while others are much more generic.

The group-based pejoratives and racial pejoratives in particular typically emphasize prejudices about a group rather than make a specific judgment about an individual. Contrast the term "scab" (a pejorative referring to a person who works in spite of declared strike) with the the term "wop" (a vulgar pejorative referring to Italians and people of Italian descent). The former term emphasizes a particular behavior and derives it power from the hatred of that behavior and its effect on the lives of the union workers whose negotiation tactic is being undermined. The latter term derives all its meaning and force from prejudice.

Some terms function both ways, such as the term "nag." The term definitely focuses on a particular behavior, namely excessive repetition of instruction or criticism, but it also associates with attitudes about women and draws on those attitudes as part of its meaning. This is why it is awkward or humorous to refer to the same behavior in a male as "nagging." As that humorous usage becomes more common, the humor starts to fade and the meaning of the term starts to change so that the association with female stereotypes is weakened, so we can imagine a time in the future when "nag" might become a gender-neutral term referring only to the behavior and not the prejudice. This certainly hasn't happened yet.

Context always allows a term from one class to be used as if it were from the other, as in the vulgar example "What is the difference between a black man and a nigger?" By taking the form of a judgment-based pejorative, the speaker, at least nominally, is making specific judgments about individuals, even though the extremely vulgar term "nigger" draws all of its power from racial stereotypes. Whether the question is asked sincerely by someone who thinks of "nigger" as a radial category within blacks or insincerely by someone who just want to refer to his or her prejudice with the pretense of fairness, the word still draws heavily on a particular set of assumptions about a group of people to derive its meaning.

The term "white trash" works much the same way. The exact meaning is hard to pin down because it varies with the particular prejudices of the group that uses it. This raises a question about how much of the set of prejudices is drawn into the discussion when a racially charged term is used. This was the topic I initially wanted to address, but I've run short of time laying the groundwork, so I'll have to leave that to a PART II of this post later on.