Language Is Also A Tool Of Oppression

For cartoon credits, kindly see below.

In any language or system of communication, whether spoken or written, words and names are the way in which we refer to objects, people, or abstract phenomena. These words not only tell us about the nature of the things they name, but over time, come to carry their own connotations, descriptive meanings, and cultural values. Dangerously, they can also be used to highlight or obscure very real facts about the world.

For example, under the administration of President George W. Bush in the United States, it was a common practice for potential suspects in crimes being investigated by the CIA, to be transported for interrogation and torture to countries where this was still legal. This extrajudicial kidnapping, not to mention the subsequent torture, was a violation of the United Nations' Convention Against Torture. However, these heinous crimes and violations of international law were given an innocuous term that was essentially meaningless to the layman, thereby stripping it of much of its power to shock and invite criticism - extraordinary rendition.

According to the political theorist and commentator Noam Chomsky, this stripping of the force from political language is a deliberate way to undermine independent thought and essentially convince people that social injustices and political crimes are acceptable. He argued in an interview that "virtually every term in political discourse has two meanings - one is its literal meaning and the second, which is often quite different, is its usage in… political warfare." This dichotomy means that contexts that use the second, more insidious meaning of the word, are often accepted in public discourse without much question. 

For example, while democracy does literally mean that the people get to rule the state, Chomsky argues that it has been misused to represent a form of government in which people aligned with corporations and other centres of power are elected by the people but make decisions that serve their own interests. 

However, because this is still notionally referred to as a democracy, the word becomes a weapon to discourage people from rising up against this faux democracy. This was signaled in George Orwell's Animal Farm, in which those in power, the pigs Snowball and Napoleon, use doublespeak and deliberately obfuscate their meaning, to hide their plans from the other animals.

At other times words can be misused to mitigate the force of the issues they refer to, without actually leading to tangible action about these issues. This gives rise to what the counterculture comedian George Carlin referred to as "soft language," which finds a palatable, politically correct way of referring to an issue so that it does not seem like as much of a problem - essentially, a trick based on semantics. By renaming a problem, it attempts to make it go away. Often, these problems are the ones that challenge the status quo of privilege and power in society.

For example, Carlin writes about the twisting of language to make it more palatable, that "Poor people used to live in slums. Now 'the economically disadvantaged' occupy 'substandard housing' in the 'inner cities.' And a lot of them are broke. They don't have 'negative cash flow.' They're broke! Because many of them were fired. In other words, management wanted to 'curtail redundancies in the human resources area,' and so, many workers are no longer 'viable members of the workforce.' Smug, greedy, well-fed white people have invented a language to conceal their sins. It's as simple as that." Politically correct language often becomes correct only to the extent that it exonerates the omissions of those in power, who in turn use evasive language or jargon to hide these omissions. 

Another example he cites is that of a precise name for the psychological distress and exhaustion experienced by soldiers who have seen active combat. First called shellshock after the First World War, the term used for the illness gradually became more and more sanitised and innocuous-seeming, going from shell-shock to battle fatigue to operational exhaustion to posttraumatic stress disorder, ultimately removing all the humanity from the word and playing down the effects of this all-too-real mental illness. 

This, Carlin said in one of his comedy routines, is not just a matter of terminology; on the contrary, "I’ll bet you if we’d have still been calling it shellshock, some of those Vietnam veterans might have gotten the attention they needed at the time." 

Political correctness, or the use of neutral terminology, is necessary when it comes to social interaction with groups that have been historically marginalised or the object of slurs and misnomers. Avoiding the use of these slurs, or substituting more neutral terms, is merely trying to correct a previous wrong, but at the same time, it cannot be a substitute for actual, tangible economic and political change and justice. For example, capitalizing the letter B in the word Black could be projected as a matter of courtesy, but its role is infinitesimal when it comes to mitigating the effects of systemic racism and violence that the community faces. 

At times, however, even political correctness may come close to Carlin's soft language, obscuring the truth for the sake of making it palatable. For example, members of the disabled community have recently made the shift to referring to themselves as 'disabled,' as prior, politically correct terms such as 'differently abled' or 'special needs' only seemed to mark them out as an 'Other' to people without disabilities, or as those in need of extra care and accommodations. 

On the contrary, the word 'disabled' merely reflects the fact that, in a world designed for able-bodied people, those who have disabilities may often be at a disadvantage in public spaces or in people's mindsets. The previous terms had done nothing to mitigate this disadvantage, and in fact, created other erroneous perceptions about the community.

Language, and the terms we use for various situations, actions and people, can be very revealing, cutting through the thicket of confusion to pinpoint the truth. At the same time, it can be the source of this same confusion, using vagueness or purposefully neutral terminology to disguise flaws or injustice in society at large. 

Using language in a way that doesn't hurt people's feelings, and avoiding words seen as pejorative and discriminatory, is the bare minimum associated with social interaction, not a way of solving deeply entrenched problems. Words and terminology cannot be allowed to distract us from these systemic issues.

Cartoon copyright: 'Jeppesen Travel Planning' by Mike Keefe. Published in The Denver Post on 06/01/2007. Available at permalink https://www.intoon.com/cartoons.cfm/id/36213. Used here for non-commercial purposes.