Terms of Disagreement

On language it's time to leave behind

As a free speech advocate, I think people should be allowed to express themselves linguistically as they wish (understanding the social consequences that may follow). That said, there have been a few terms that have entered our lexicon that I regard as counterproductive at best. For those with an honorable stake in trying to use language to reform society, here are a few that I think should enter the realm of historical referents rather than active usage.

BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color). According to the New York Times, this is a term that first emerged in the 2010s and became widespread after the George Floyd murder in 2020 as a means of coalition-building among non-white races. It has since become standard terminology in academic and Human Resource Departments to signal solidarity in the fight against racism. Ironically, however, BIPOC is a term that itself has racist overtones. There’s an implied racial hierarchy in “black” coming first, “indigenous” coming second, and “people of color” generically following as a basket of identities. (As you may have noted, I’m not in favor of capitalizing these words, or “white.”) There’s also an implication that all people in the POC designation—which includes those from, say, Venezuela, Sri Lanka, and Samoa—have a shared outlook, even a shared outlook on American racism, that is problematically reductive. One might say the same of the demographic category AAPI—Asian American and Pacific Islander—which lumps together people such as Japanese and Koreans, who have discrete cultural traditions—and conflicts—both in Asia and the United States. (We tend not to think of Japan as a collection of islands, but like Palau, it is in fact an archipelago.) Given the ideological pluralism among racial groups we saw in our recent election, this category needs scrutiny and reworking—including the question of whether it really is a category.

Latinx. Whereas BIPOC was a term coined for racial reasons, this one emerged for gendered ones, specifically to avoid the masculine and feminine grammar of Romance languages, Spanish in particular. But Latinx has become a term with strong class valences, again the patois of the elite. As has been widely noted, it has never caught on with the vast majority of Latin people themselves. “For the more than 460 million native speakers in the world, Spanish is not an abstract remnant of colonialism but a lived means of communication,” the Colombian-American writer Bryan Betancur has observed. “Expecting a multinational ethnic group to tolerate language simply because it is acceptable to English speakers is linguistic imperialism under the guise of social progress.” It is again ironic that language meant to signal enlightenment is actually a form of ethnocentrism.

-phobic. This suffix, which is used widely but generally centers on sex and gender (“homophobic”; “transphobic”), is used to call attention to forms of bias that are labeled as irrational forms of hatred—more specifically irrational forms of fear. But it’s often not clear that this is actually the case. One can be opposed, for example, to say, biological males competing in girls’ sports without such a concern being irrational, for example, and one can hatefully denigrate a group of people without being irrationally afraid of them. In any case, we never speak of vegetarians as “carnophobes,” for example, or advocates of abortion rights as “pregnophobes.” It’s fair game to declare one’s implacable resistance or defiance to those whom one regards as deeply wrong—and to specify why. But shorthand such as “phobic” becomes a form of name-calling that obscures meaning, weakens one’s case, and perhaps even dehumanizes those with whom you disagree.

In the interests of balance, I’ll note another unhelpful term that gets slung around: “woke.” This began on the left to refer to a sudden awareness of structural racism that pervades and distorts American society. (It is redolent of a religious awakening, and as such is an illustration of the way efforts to suppress religious ideas in secular discourse tend to lead them to come in the back door.) Its origins notwithstanding, “woke” was quickly seized by the right as a catch-all term for any progressive idea or policy one doesn’t like. It doesn’t have the official status of terms like the above terms in polite society, so arguably has less influence. But it’s at least as problematic as an effort to describe reality usefully and fairly.

I’ll conclude by saying that most of the people I’ve known who use terms like BIPOC, Latinx, and transphobic have their hearts in the right place. And at the end of the day, the actions you take matter more than the words you use. But insofar as the goal of language is to build bridges and convince skeptics, precision is helpful. It’s hard work. But worthwhile, too.