There was a time when being an atheist took guts. Those days are over. Now in some circles saying you believe in God takes guts. It’s a good thing lions haven't been made extinct yet, we may need them again.
So much for religious tribalism.
When I was married, my wife was a feminist. I know that now (I recently asked her just to be sure) but I didn’t know it then. There were a lot of things going on in what came to be known as the “war between the sexes” but not all of them got assigned labels right away.
I remember us arguing over the “Equal Rights Amendment”. She was always going on about it and I was always saying that when these old documents said “men” or “man” any rational modern person should know that it applied to both men and women. She never saw it that way. Long after we went our separate ways, I see that she was right.
Not one to be afraid of taking both sides of the same argument, when the debate came up about letting gays get “married” I said that the word “married” had a very specific meaning and we shouldn’t go cramming all sorts of other things into that meaning. After all, we didn’t end racism by simply calling “black” people “white” did we? (I actually thought this was a pretty good argument, but only in the sense of winning arguments, not in the sense of being right about the issue).
What it comes down to though is that no amount of changing the definition of words, or not changing the definition of words, or banning them for that matter, will change what (as we used to say) “is in the human heart”. That takes time. And since some people are never capable of changing their minds about anything, sometimes it just takes a whole generation or three to die off for things to really change so that they can be noticed in our daily lives. We are certainly in such times now.
When I was young, using the N-word (note how I didn’t actually use the word there) was commonplace. Most people using it didn’t even consider it a pejorative term. Back then it was either the N-word, or “negro”, or “colored person”. Only later were “African American” and “black” invented, and for a while there seemed to be some jockeying around for the category of prefered word.
Our federal government (and others) trying their best to make sure that we weren't racist any more introduced language into every document an American has to fill out trying to ascertain what race they are a member of. I still haven’t figured that strategy out.
In fact, I find that the best way to avoid problems with all generic forms of tribalism is just to not acknowledge that the various “tribes” exist. I wouldn’t go up to someone and say “Aren’t you that Mexican plumber that Mrs. Williamson used?” Throughout the year I run into people of all shapes sizes colors and nationalities and it is almost never necessary to refer to them as anything other than their name, or if you don’t know their name, “sir”, “ma’am”, or “hey you”. Problem solved I would say.
But wait! You might be thinking that I could clean up my language entirely and still be a racist! I don’t have to acknowledge race, sex, religion, or national origin to discriminate against someone. And you’d be right.
Furthermore, if I wanted to impose my prejudices on a very young person I wouldn’t have to use any special terminology at all. The “hints” of racism, sexism, homophobia and all the other phobias and “isms” are all around us, in advertising, TV shows, magazines, and of course the Internet. We are so surrounded by these things that we can’t see the forest for the trees so to speak.
Or to use another corny metaphor, we literally swim in a sea of prejudice, so pervasive that we can’t look away from it. By encouraging a child to watch certain TV shows, play certain games and avoid others, we are sending all sorts of subliminal messages to them. Can anyone say with certainty that they haven’t introduced their child or someone else's to concepts that will hold them back in later life?
All that said, it may surprise anyone who has read this far for me to say I have no problem whatsoever with this “Ban Bossy” campaign. Let me add that this is so even though I have little regard for Sheryl Sandberg, a person who didn’t exactly rise from the worst of circumstances as (according to Wikipedia): the daughter of a father who was an “ophthalmologist, and her mother has a PhD”. She was able to attend Harvard, and anybody who knows anything knows that the importance of a Harvard degree is about 20% what you know and 80% who you know when you come out. She got to be rich at Google and richer still at Facebook. Her reputation at both places includes that other word that starts with the letter “b”, not just “bossy”. Her job at Google was marketing related and while she got a nice promotion at Facebook, the one thing you have to admit at this point is that she remembered her marketing skills and still knows how to get people’s attention!
The notion of banning a word (which unlike the N-word has too many generic uses for us to do without) is nothing but a marketing gimmick, and judging from the outrage, a very successful one. We will long since have forgotten the controversy over the word and lingering in many minds will be the notion that maybe, just maybe, we are nudging young children in one direction or another based on an outmoded worldview.
Rest assured, you will still be able to use the word “bossy” in ten years without people giving you dirty looks. It might be good though, if you are a parent or an aunt, uncle or grandparent to not use that word or other pejorative words like it on any of the young people you care for. Can we not all agree on that?
And now for some other, mostly failed, attempts to ban words…
