Language Policing For "Justice"
I stand up for people and causes...like by being civilly disobedient and a vocal critic of the TSA and fighting -- successfully -- to force the LA City Attorney to unkill the mediation program I volunteer for. (I'm on book hiatus but I'll start again soon doing mediations -- after I do a talk for hire to train mediators.)

So does a friend of mine, who emailed me this Michelle Goldberg NYT piece -- "The Absurd Side of the Social Justice Industry" -- with this comment:

Gee, I've been saying it for only, oh, 30 years. But what do I know? I'm just a stupid old white lady with undeserved privilege.

Whereas people who've never stuck their necks out for a political principle in their lives but who capitalize the "b" in "black" and use terms like "BIPOC" and "Latinx" and who tell you their pronouns -- those are the real crusaders for justice!

I'm so disgusted by the racist infantlizing and precious-sizing of capitalizing only "black" by the NYT and some other papers.

Goldberg writes:

If you follow debates over the strident style of social justice politics often derided as "wokeness," you might have heard about a document called "Advancing Health Equity: A Guide to Language, Narrative and Concepts." Put out by the American Medical Association and the Association of American Medical Colleges Center for Health Justice, the guide is a long list of terms and phrases that some earnest people have decided others in the medical field should avoid using, along with their preferred substitutes.

Some of these substitutions make sense; health care professionals shouldn't be referring to people who've been in prison as "ex-cons." Some are a matter of keeping up with the times, like capitalizing Black when talking about Black people. Some, however, are obnoxious and presumptuous and would impede clear communication. For example, the guide suggests replacing "vulnerable" with "oppressed," even though they're not synonymous: it's not oppression that makes the elderly vulnerable to Covid.

My guess is that very few people will follow these recommendations. As Conor Friedersdorf points out in The Atlantic, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, still talks about "those who are most vulnerable" when discussing vaccination. "Advancing Health Equity" advises steering clear of words with "violent connotation" like "combat" or "target," but last week the president of the American Medical Association gave a speech calling doctors "an army against the virus." At one point the document itself critiques how, in health care, diseases "become the main target rather than the social and economic conditions that produce health inequities."

Like most other reports written by bureaucratic working groups, "Advancing Health Equity" would probably be read by almost no one if it did not inadvertently advance the right-wing narrative that progressive newspeak is colonizing every aspect of American life. Still, the existence of this document is evidence of a social problem, though not, as the guide instructs us to say instead of "social problem," a "social injustice." The problem is this: Parts of the "diversity, equity and inclusion" industry are heavy-handed and feckless, and the left keeps having to answer for them.

..."Teachers and administrators said that conservative activists had cherry-picked the most extreme materials to try to prove their point," The New York Times reported. I'm sure that's true, but it's also true that school districts should avoid using training documents that will embarrass them if they're made public.

Such training would be worth fighting for if it had a record of success in changing discriminatory behavior, but it doesn't. As the scholars Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev wrote in The Economist, hundreds "of studies of anti-bias training show that even the best programs have short-lived effects on stereotypes and no discernible effect on discriminatory behavior."

...But substantive change is hard; telling people to use different words is easy. One phrase you won't find in "Advancing Health Equity" is "universal health care": The American Medical Association has been a consistent opponent of Medicare for All. The word "abortion" isn't in there either, though it would advance health equity if more doctors were willing to perform one.

In The Washington Post, the columnist Matt Bai described the document as an ominous development. "I'd argue that it's actually a powerful testament to where we are at the moment -- and it should frighten you as much as it does me." It doesn't frighten me: In a truly Orwellian situation, people would actually have to follow new linguistic edicts instead of being able to laugh at them.

But it does irritate me, because it's so counterproductive. "It's not scary, it's just ridiculous," is not a winning political argument.