As you may have realized by now, I’m a real stickler about words and their meaning. So often we use and react to words without truly reflecting on their meaning. This is somewhat unavoidable and natural, but I believe some simple reflection would prevent so many conflicts and resolve so many false hurdles.
In many future posts I hope to give many examples of how our thoughtlessness often makes life more difficult than it needs to be. I will engage in many reframes of our world by looking at words and their meaning, and hopefully finding definitions which remove the cobwebs from our mental vision.
In today’s post I want to take a look at a few of the terms we use when identifying certain groups of people and how inaccurate of downright misleading they tend to be. In the last 50 years the US has gone through a number of terms to designate the dark skinned portion of the populace. They have been referred to as Negroes, colored people, blacks, people of color, Afr0-Americans and African Americans.
One of the major reason for the perpetual shift in designation is the desire to remove the perceived stigma in the previous term. Instead of dealing with the fact that stigmas aren’t inherent in words and titles but in people’s brains and hearts, we just hop from designation to designation as if that will solve the problem. Sort of like removing the word hatred from someone’s vocabulary will successfully extinguish the emotion the word represents.
The currently politically correct term seems to be African American which to me is a very poor term for many reasons. One is that it makes many potentially false assumptions about the person. First of all, who is to say that the dark person I see on the street is a citizen of the US. Why couldn’t they be a tourist from Europe, Asia, or some island nation such as the Bahamas?
If they are indeed from a different nation, there is no politically correct term that I am aware of that I can use in the US. I am expected to refer to all black and brown people that I see and meet as African American. Before referring to a black man or woman should I find out if they live across the border and therefore refer to them as an African Mexican, or see if they are European and refer to them as African Italian or African German?
Yes, and what if their people have been from an island nation such as Jamaica for many generations and who do not consider themselves African any more than any European whose family may have originally been from Africa many centuries ago? Is it fair to call them African when their resemblance is racial rather than geographical. In a global community where people are traveling and relocating with increased frequency why are we introducing words that designate people which are increasingly geographically based?
Is this anything more than a feeble attempt by the US government to get all people living in the US to be more loyal to it’s policies because we are all American’s, even though we are a melting pot of diverse groups?
When referring to my heritage I call myself an Italian. When talking about myself in terms of citizenship I call myself an American. When it comes to loyalties I call refer to myself as a human being. My friends who are dark skinned I refer to as blacks. I explain why I am most comfortable with that term and ask their permission to deviate from the absurd African American tag. Most of my black friends state that they refer to themselves as blacks and seldom use the African American term other than in formal political discussion.
I think it is fascinating to see our language go against the trend of society. We are living in a shrinking world where we are choosing where to live and moving frequently. It strikes me as a little more than odd that we are choosing to label people according t0 where they are located on the planet. If I were to move to China would I be referred to an American Asian, or just be called Asian?
Years ago we divided the globe into three major racial groups. Individuals where either Caucasian (white), Negro (black) or Oriental (yellow). This system was not without its controversies and gaps. American Indians were often put into their own racial group of being Redskins or they were lumped in with the Orientals. Many other people notably the people of India and the Arabs were kind of looked as being cross breeds and did not easily fit into the three race world view.
Though this system was imperfect and needed improvement it was far more accurate than our current verbiage. People who use to be Orientals or the race from Asia and other lands of the East are now Asians. Yet, once again this geographical label is far less accurate than a racial one. Does one really consider someone living in India as Asian? And again what do we do about the Arabians? Are they a separate group or all they Europeans and Asians depending on where their nation is located?
According to many sources the three racial world view of the early 20th century was actually a four race planet. The fourth racial group was the Semites which consisted of all the Arabic peoples. This group was very controversial due to the political difficulty of where to put the Jewish peoples around the world. Though they were technically Semites and referred to themselves as Semites, they were not recognizing the other Arab peoples as Semites.
I remember growing up and hearing many stories of hatred and prejudice waged against the Jewish peoples around the globe. The Holocaust was not thought of as being an isolated event but more often than not portrayed as the culmination of long standing tensions towards Jews for centuries. The Jewish community itself labeled and had labeled this bias as Anti-Semitism which they claimed had deep roots in history. I remember many of my Jewish friends explaining this as a reaction of envy of their being the chosen people. And even the nuns in my Catechism classes talked of how the chosen people all the way from Moses were tested by God. These tests often took the form of persecution and hardship in both plague and war.
To this day I still find it confusing that the Jewish and Zionist communities often bewail the strongest and harshest form of Anti-Semitism from their fellow Arabs. Aren’t the Arab nations themselves Semites? Are they all not descendants of the same tribes?
This is just another example of how we use language without thinking about its meaning and content. How much of the criticism against Israel is founded on racial hatred and prejudice of the Jewish peoples? How much of it is anger at the policies of the state of Israel often labeled as Zionism, and how much of it is political debate totally devoid of any racial or ethnic heritage?
Yet, even as I write this I worry about people perceiving me as being Anti-Semitic for even bringing up the topic. I admit I can find no term that I feel comfortable in using. Just as most terms referring to blacks have a negative connotation and leave one open to being labeled a racist or bigot, I find no term to use which frees me from being labeled a Anti-Semite.
Referring to someone as a Jew or being Jewish opens one to suspicion. So does referring to Zionism or Zionist, even though this is more about political ideology than ethnicity. I guess one could say Israeli, but this again should limit your discussion to people who actually live in Israel.
When one talks of the differences in race and ethnicity they are often reprimanded for being closed minded and judgmental. I personally find many advantages to diversity which to me adds and improves human nature and enriches our personal lives.
In the next post I will address the concerns I have with a desire to create a global community devoid of ethnic and cultural diversity.
Jim Guido