Word Wars: Wokeism and the Battle Over Language

hello everybody my name is David Brooks I write for the New York Times and the Atlantic and chair something called weave the social fabric project here at the Aspen Institute and I'm going to be interviewing John McWhorter who teaches at Columbia Linguistics he teaches does a little music a little does Common Core I think I do yeah also writes for the New York Times a sad malady we both suffer from uh and uh has written a number of books the most recent of which is called woke racism and so we're going to talk a little about wokeness but first we're going to talk you take advantage of your linguistic knowledge to talk about language I'll try so the first question for me is how powerful is language like I write a lot of words and if my words were really powerful people would do what they want more than they do yes so and some of the recent politics is based on the supposition the language is really powerful and you can really hurt people with language so how do we think about the power of language or the lack of power well words can certainly hurt but I think that we're often taught that language shapes thought more immediately than it does or more immediately than it can and so we're often taught that if we change what people say if we change the language then we'll change the way people think and that sounds perfectly reasonable but it's only slightly true and not enough that would motivate the people who think that they're doing God's work by trying to make us say different things and so um random example there used to be something that was shamelessly called slum clearance people were supposed to like the idea that slums were being cleared a lot of people who lived in the quote-unquote slums didn't see it that way not to mention people who were outside of them and so there was a new term that you start seeing in the 50s and especially the 60s the idea was to make people not mind slum clearance by calling it urban renewal now that's a very Artful term but notice that it didn't change thought or I'm going to do one that's a little bit less cuddly or distant but it's also very important black then in about 1989 African-American and the idea was to get Beyond negative stereotypes of black people now it's been a while we're used to the term African-American I don't think it really buds the needle on any of those stereotypes really what you have to change is the thought not the words but we live in a time when it's often thought especially by people of a certain political persuasion that the way to make progress is to keep all of us on our toes about the way we say things and I think that that is a less rigorous version of civil rights than many people would have known before and that the left would have known before not to mention the right yeah now my general approach is I'll call you whatever you want to be called is that the right approach that is a politeness of course but on the other hand we're often taught today that it's important to keep wanting to be called new things when really the idea is to change thought rather than to change what people call you so how do you think about the whole pronouns thing well this is the thing language needs to change if language is not keeping up with genuine categories and so for example if there's a time when you're taught to say chairperson or chair rather than chairman that made perfect sense because there was a what was called the women's lib feminist Revolution I think probably everybody in this room thinks that that was a good thing it had been happening for a long time and so chair made perfect sense spouse it's a word I've never heard anybody use in an old movie it's a word that we now use all the time and that's because husband and wife are beginning to sound a little tacky that makes sense there needs to be a they now you could write a whole book about they somebody essentially is right now I'm not going to say who who I is but but there needs to be a gender-neutral pronoun that grammar pusses have no problem with they're people who consider themselves neither one nor the other and you can't have a new pronoun no offense to anybody but Z none of those will ever work it has to be something that we already use there's they it's hard to use they in the new way but the kids 13 year olds just use it fluently and so I think we can try so I'm very much in favor of the Venus as much of a challenge as it is if you go with your next book with a I hope you'll share royalties with all your other co-authors I'm going to try very hard except um what about I mean that there's a guy named Frank Luntz who now does more polling but he used to do phrases so death panels yeah those are nice ways to get people's attention but the truth always outs and so after a while it's only a sliver of people who really think that there are death panels that's called colorful use of language but I'm more worried about it when we are taught that we have to say something on the pain of being labeled social reprobates and losing our jobs or at least our friends that's not a good that's not a good look yeah okay I should say the audience the norm for these things is that we talk for like 40 40 minutes and then you guys get to ask questions for 10 but that's not how it's going to work today we're going to talk for like 20 or 25 before going to the floor I've been feeling a lot of people have a lot of opinions and it seems like a good idea to go to the floor sooner so let's go to wokeness what is it [Laughter] um wokeness used to be just a new word for politically correct and I mean in the good way you are aware of larger circumstances that often go by the name of structural factors Etc woke is now a slur and it's a slur because something's set in where you were told that if you didn't agree with a certain collection of opinions you weren't just of a different opinion you were a bad person and you literally should lose your job you should be cast from society a lot of people got tired of that I have to say that frankly I was one of them and that is why woke is now often said with a sneer and so today I think unfortunately the dominant word the dominant definition of woke is someone who has coherent hard leftist political views who feels that those who don't share them should be shunned and made to suffer that is the definition that most people are thinking of but I missed the days when woke just meant that you understood that life was larger than whether or not somebody called someone a name or burned a cross on somebody's lawn that was wise but unfortunately the word is ruined and we need a new word for what was once politically correct and then was woke until about 2019. I'm not sure what that new word is going to be yeah now you wrote this book where racism and you've been writing for a number of years about what you were referring to as vocalism then Along Comes Ron DeSantis and that word comes out of his mouth every third syllable and so yeah what's it's been like to see it get so politicized in that way when you observe DeSantis and the other Republic you know David there's a cuddly answer I could give to that but I'm getting old honestly I am not a DeSantis fan but the way that he is utilizing that word I'm sorry but it's the fault of the people who took it upon themselves to start tossing people out of Windows for not having their views it's something that happened especially in 2020 and it happened for a cocktail of reasons it's the pandemic we're scared we're upset we're lonely all of life is on Zoom where it's really easy to be mean and so zoom and slack created a lot of that new feeling and what happened to George Floyd was nauseating but it also happened in the spring about three months into the pandemic when it started to become clear that it wasn't going to end and so it was a reason to go outside and be with people and I'm not saying that it was phony but all of that came together and it meant that all of a sudden if you weren't woke you were evil a lot of people especially people in the middle justifiably did not like it and unfortunately it then ends up overflowing the bathtub and becoming something that somebody like DeSantis can use for the wrong reasons but it started with some really scary stuff that happened in 2020 and it's why I would write a book like woke racism instead of my linguistic nerd stuff I was really sad and I was really mad and DeSantis is just a product of what I was sitting on a porch writing in Anger about in the summer of 2020. now let's go to a little of the intellectual history here because in your book you trace some ideas that are core here and the one that defines wokeness to me I'm not sure I will use the word in the future but um it's the idea that Society is elementally and fundamentally and permanently a series of oppressor and oppressed classes and it's sort of a marxing idea that there's always this conflict between Class between oppressor and oppressed groups is that the intellectual core of what motivates people who then others call woke yes and the problem with it is that there's truth in it one needs to understand how inequality works one cannot be taught history the way it was taught in the 1950s but for the idea to be that everything is about who's on top and who's on the bottom with that often being a shorthand for white people on top and everybody else on the bottom what it is is not wrong but it's vastly oversimplified to take on that view is to abjure the responsibility of engaging the fact that life is complicated and that social history is extremely complicated it's tempting but it's just it's oversimplified and the problem is that even children can feel that it's oversimplified it's easier to pretend that change doesn't happen than to allow the perfectly obvious reality that it does happen but it happens slowly and so that's what we should be taught and I'm not trying to make some cheap DeSantis argument about CRT in schools but that is what wisdom is supposed to be the woke idea that everything's about this and this and nothing ever changes it's not wrong it's just it's oversimplified and it's not constructive because in real life we change things and it's not through throwing people out of Windows and it's not through telling people not to use certain words yeah now in your book you call it a religion why do you why do you do that because it is one and I was hoping you to expand it yes I have taken so much heat for using that word but any Anthropologist who knew nothing about us would see no difference between the way that way of looking at things is wielded and argued and argued against nobody will see any difference between that and a religion and a religion can be a wonderful thing most religions also have their senior sides and that's what's going on with this religion what actually made me start speaking out about this is when I thought this isn't just a series of beliefs this is something that is as difficult to reach as a religious religion you can see the exact same feeling in its most extreme adherence that you can see in religion and I wanted people to realize and this is something that you're not supposed to say at Aspen and I have to be careful but we want to talk across the Divide but there's some people who cannot be reached about certain issues because it is not about going from A to B to C on those particular issues it's a religion and I noticed it that if you have a different view with some people like that and you reach a certain point in the argument I found myself thinking wait a minute this is exactly as if I was trying to teach Somebody That Jesus didn't love them I don't mean like it it is it we use different words for it we say ideology if it's not about Jesus or Muhammad Etc but they're fine lines between them some people would say Creed but I really meant religion and if I wrote the book again I would keep calling it a religion because I really do believe that that's that's what it is a lot of people aren't with me on that and I understand why but that's why I mean the obvious thing is you're implying that it's not based on reason uh because I happen to believe in religion so I don't think it's a bad word but there's a part of many religions that says that in certain areas you are not supposed to use reason that you're supposed to just believe and there's nothing wrong with that but that's true of this new religion too yeah and to hear me say that with my you know my snotty voice and my not being religious I know I'm not the best messenger for it but I truly believe that okay now what do you do with the argument that you know 2020 as you said it was a very fraught time but the big thing that happened was racial Reckoning which is like a problem an issue or a process of this level of significance and the cancelings were a problem of this level of significance so why are you focusing here and not here that's interesting I think that the two things are on the same level so the racial Reckoning created many wonderful things they're things that are becoming normal now that weren't normal in 2019 in terms of our awareness in terms of who counts in terms of whose views are listened to and I think that's a great thing but alongside that was this very unnecessarily punitive culture often in the name of people of my race and I don't think that was a good thing I think frankly that a great deal of that and David I'm sorry I'm not being dramatic but I think a great deal of it was horrible horrible and so to me the Reckoning and then the canceling and it but I I take your point but I didn't see it as trivial yeah okay uh so do you you know I one thing I'm not an expert in a lot of things including Linguistics but I do work at the New York Times Yale University the Atlantic Aspen I am an expert in Elite Progressive institutions yeah uh and my perception uh is that uh what people called Peak wokeness was about 18 months ago or maybe even two years ago now yes is that your view yeah it's changing and why do you think that is because a critical mass of people started speaking out and that's how these conversations go and so I think that the extreme versions people are feeling on the defensive and I think we're beginning to get to a point that I now have this Nostalgia for 2019. we're going to get back to where things were in 2019. I thought there was a great awokening already then and then came what happened in 2020 I liked the 2019 version better but yes things are changing yeah to sound the alarm the same way now as say 18 months ago is sensationalist right yeah let's talk about class you have a concept in the book called The elect and there are there are many people who made the argument is that the language of what we call wokeness is a linguistic display frankly of elitism that you have to have a certain level of Education to comfortably use words like intersectionality problematic cisgender and so what's the class element here well you know I don't see anything wrong with there being a new jargon so to speak a certain collection of about 27 words that Highly Educated people use and the people who are centered in activist communities use and you just name some of them nothing wrong with those words latinx is never going to leave that world and there's nothing wrong with that cisgender is one I think about I had never heard of that I heard that about 2013 from my students I thought I had never heard that as a class of people but okay I get it but those are not going to be words that the person on the street ever uses I get the feeling and there have always been words that hyper-educated people only use but yes we're seeing a kind of a class difference there but you know any language spoken by more than 17 people has class stratification of that kind and we're just seeing new aspects of it being born as we speak which is not usually how abruptly it works yeah but I think there's a even Beyond those words there I think there's a class element to your argument I'm old enough to have remembered when when I started as a police reporter in Chicago I worked with journalists who didn't go to college and now you really could not get hired not only if you hadn't gone to college if you hadn't gone to an elite college and so them well uh I'll tell that I shouldn't tell Tales out of school but at the New York Times we have assistance and they they filter out all the applications and they give us three and I get a broad diversity of America I get Stanford Stanford Yale sometimes I get Yale Stanford uh and but there is an element here in a lot frankly of the institutions where I work where and I would say in the media generally that basically we decided working class we're not going to be working with us folks we're not going to be in our world and their voices for a long number of decades were not going to be represented in the world we depicted and when you look at the depiction of reality and you don't see your story in it you tend to get angry and we basically told a lot of people their voices weren't worth hearing and I think they revolted and so when I when I read the phrase the elect that's what I heard that's what I heard I know what you mean and certainly I think there is a perspective among people using these Elite words that people of a different realm of society should use those words that they should think that way but they're just too ignorant too and general developments from that view might make someone feel that those people shouldn't be in The Newsroom because their Horizons are broad enough yes there is certainly that but the elect and you know it's interesting I am I'm not good at making up catchy terms I'm not good at making up term titles for my books I have to drink to come up with anything for them and coming up with catchy names for things has never been my forte the elect has not caught on that is I can tell that that's not going to work but I use it throughout the book The elect are usually Highly Educated people though they're not the people who would be revolting from quote unquote below they're people who are seeking a sense of belonging among one another and a sense that they're doing the right thing especially possibly out of working out and guilt because they are the sorts of people who get hired as interns at the New York Times okay talk to me about your students I have found over the years because of uh not just not even canceling because of fear of judgment from peers my students have grown progressively less willing to argue with each other in class [Music] have you have you found that oh yes that started in exactly 2013 and it became all but impossible after 2020. and what it is is not that the students of all quote unquote gone crazy or the like but all it takes is one and a half students who stridently believe in say the elect Viewpoint and all but maybe one or two especially nervy students will just be quiet because they don't want to get yelled at or they don't want to get outed on social media and it means that it can be it's not impossible but it's much harder to get a discussion going because that elect student is generally brilliant and articulate and scary it's hard when somebody yells intersectionality into your face and so for class discussion it takes more work I used to say it was impossible I'm now learning how to get it going anyway but it's an art and it's because of fear it's not the whole student body I would venture that it's probably about one in 20 students but that's enough to change the whole tone of discussion in class yeah and I was I observed in the institutions I'm familiar with in the beginning days there were the mostly the elect were in our institutions were younger and then there were people over 40 who were terrified sort of the liberal progressives but sort of old-fashioned liberals and in my view in the last year or two the over 40s and even the under 20s who didn't like what was happening have grown less terrified and have begun to assert themselves and say no we will have open discussion here very much and I'm glad to see that conversation which is often unpleasant but conversation has an effect I think that enough people have said this isn't the way it needs to go for there to be social justice that a lot of people have have pulled have pulled back now I'm sure that the people in question feel that racism and sexism and classism have had their way as they always do and they need to look for a new strategy but you know the conversation is always sloppy like that and it's at the point where yes many people are beginning to be brave enough to say no let's go back to 2019 and have real discussions about difficult things without anybody being called evil that is a positive element I think now your argument is that a lot of these people who want to pursue racial Justice are actually having a negative effect on black lives yeah that's the problem explain that yeah so it isn't just that people are doing something that isn't pretty it's that in asserting how social justice should work in this way you end up condescending to black people you end up leaving black people getting killed in neighborhoods where the police pull back for example you end up leaving black kids being underserved in schools where violence is allowed to persist and standards are allowed to be lowered in the name of not imposing whiteness on the kids all sorts of things happen where what I really see is an unintentional woke racism so the idea is not just this isn't fair or this isn't right that wouldn't make me write a book about something it's that I see black people getting hurt and especially these days I hear from black professors who are not woke enough who are getting attacked act by woke students many of whom aren't even black themselves and losing their jobs or being demoted there is a black woman who was evicted from her Dei position in dun dun California I forget and and one of those things update De Anza something and she was ejected from her job for not being woke enough this won't do that hurts her that hurts the people she could have helped so yeah my issue with it is not this is no good because it's not good Classical liberalism my issue is you're hurting that black kid you're hurting that black woman you're hurting that black grandmother all in the name of what you're calling the good I think that needs to be called out yeah there's a level of Cruelty in some cases there was a story in the times this week about a black woman who worked on Wall Street quit her job at Goldman Sachs created a novel her first novel and but the story is a love story between a black woman and a white conservative guy yeah and and so people objected to the plot line and so they trashed her on Goodreads which is a way of reading books and so her book was more that book shouldn't be read yeah who are they to decide and the issue is if that book were read by everybody in America what would it hurt and so what those people are doing is a kind of sincere performance art but it serves no purpose whatsoever it feeds no poor black person it helps no black cause it gets none of us ahead it's all Kabuki that needs to be Stamped Out that's exactly what I mean yeah okay just two more questions then we'll go to the the group um the first is uh I think you wrote a column recently on reparations and housing do I have that correctly as you know you forget them the minute you write them um it was either you mean the last one yes yes I did write that yeah and so it was interesting to me that because I think you've called yourself a cranky liberal Democrat I am a cranky yes because I am the Shirley Temple of Berkey and conservatives are together um but but you are for reparation so I got that right [Laughter] I think we already got reparations I think it already happened 50 years ago for years I've said why do we need new ones but I'm cranky but not just for the sake of it I'm not a performance artist and I'm reading about all these reparations movements happening people actually being given checks to buy better houses and I started thinking am I really going to keep saying no no no just because I have this this principle that's not changing that's me not allowing that the world changes and so I was thinking well you know I don't love it because I think that everything that needed to be done was done before just one thing alone affirmative action you could have called it affirmative reparation it just didn't happen to be called that but okay that was a long time ago we're in this world if reparations are going to be about housing if it's going to be about undoing what redlining did about 10 minutes ago to be honest David what I really think is going to happen is that if that happens Nationwide the smart take among influential people is going to be to pretend that it didn't matter it's going to be you know they're going to be memes saying they better not think they can treat us like animals for 400 years and just pay us off if that's what it's going to be I don't see the point of doing it now I would be interested in it as something where we said wow we've really turned a corner this is Big Stuff America has come to terms and paid attention that doesn't mean that you get rid of things that help black people but it would have to be something enormous but I'm feeling that it's coming and I can't bring myself to stand afford that and say no saying the same things I was saying 20 years ago so I I took a deep breath and I wrote that column I now do remember writing it because you have to change sometimes if you don't change at all you're either not paying attention or you don't care but I wrote that one I eat a lot of Jolly Ranchers I wrote that one sucking on a Jolly Rancher and kind of thinking no one's going to allow that it matters and so should I admit that I feel this way but I I admitted it okay so he writes on Jolly Ranchers and writes titles on Jolly Ranchers so let's go to the floor and I say Katie already has her hand up so we're going to go to Katie hi John I'm a huge fan of your work and obviously David but in March of 2022 you wrote a column that said one graceless tweet does not warrant cancellation and it was about Jeffrey Lieberman a Psychiatry professor at Columbia and I'm curious if you can share that story and I'm wondering if you've seen institutions now stop sort of quickly getting rid of people who are deemed offensive and if if you've seen kind of a shift in in a response to cancellation by Institution I'm wearing contact lenses for the first time since March 2020. because I decided to stop wearing glasses because this is Aspen however my prescription has changed and to be honest I can't really see any of you I can only see up close are you Katie Katie you can't share America's sweetheart I had no idea no um no what you're what you're talking about it's like all a blur what you're talking about is um this poor man he's this psychologist he has this eminent career he's a little long in the tooth and he's writing about this beautiful black model she's from Africa she's very very dark and he writes that she's so beautiful she's a freak of nature he tweets that no you know not great but he meant it as a compliment he didn't mean that she was a freak that's not what the expression means he means that she is beyond what one would expect nature would do and he means it in a positive way it was an aging gent probably had a glass of wine you tell him Jeffrey this is not what one does instead he gets fired from all three positions his life is ruined he writes me often his life was ruined just based on one tweet yes I see progress because I thought that sucked that's exactly the sort of thing I mean he doesn't deserve that that's not what social justice is pretending not to understand people so another example of it happens I think eight months ago same guy you know basically it's the same actor and he's in a different situation and he he's at a commencement and he sits there and he makes a little joke where he does a stupid Chinese imitation for about two seconds it really is kind of stupid he thought he was being funny it was one thing that's not the sort of thing he's ever done before and of course there were people coming over the hill wanting his head and I wrote no no not that one thing why can't he apologize why is it that when it comes to these issues there's no such thing as an apology now I don't know if I have any causal relationship in this but he watched him get fired tonight he last thing I knew still has his job that's the way it should be it should be for chronic Behavior not just one little thing that somebody does near the end of their career so maybe it's changing I'm seeing this sort of thing that happened to Jeffrey Lieberman happening less than it did to this other guy okay we'll come all the way to the front here oh you you raise your hand oh you were oh I'm sorry no I was graciously asking you know who decides what chronic behavior is many times whenever a lot of people of color have heard like someone say something racist or negative and they say well you know they had a drink right or you know they're not necessarily like that the first thing that you know people that I surround myself with would say I would never right so I would never not saying that we don't make mistakes but saying that things like that are not the top of our head so we're at a place and and I'm with you because I teach at the University of Denver Graduate School of Social Work as far as students right there are those students that are that believe that they are quote unquote more woke I don't allow my students to use terminology that they don't understand right I don't allow my students to use the terms that Academia has put on people of color such as bipoc right so in that aspect thinking about who has the power to determine what's chronic what's bad what's hurtful who has always had the power to determine that so it's just more of a rhetorical question I think you can answer I get it but I'm just going to say very briefly despite all the hardware that there's been Jeffrey Lieberman random he has he has a home he has kids he makes mistakes he hits his thumb with a hammer sometimes all sorts of things he's a whole person and so who gets to decide yeah but I can't use him as a stand-in for white perfidy I just think especially in 2022 when that happened does he deserve to lose his whole life but yes there's larger context involved and you don't always know what somebody's whole nature is but he's a human being white though he is and so I don't know him either okay right here hi John Michaelson electric ladies podcast so full disclosure I'm a writer so words mean a lot to me and I refuse to surrender the meaning of words to the screaming meanies if somebody calls me woke I say thank you so how do we get back to I mean an ESG has taken on this this craziness which in fact the reality of the word is it's called good business management and risk management so how do we get back to using the actual meaning of the word and being understood with the meaning of the word at is as it was originally defined or as we are defining it in what we write and how we speak rather than us having to count out to the crazy people who were just going to project their own on us you have to wait a bit um you can't just decree it because words have meanings in people's minds and you can't just shoo it away but if the dust dies down there can be change and so for example remember 20 years ago when people like Ann Coulter were using the word liberal as if it meant baby killer remember she's a liberal try to talk to a liberal for a long time liberals were defending themselves there were a couple of books where people defended The L Word in 2005 that was shouting into the wind there was nothing you could do even liberals were talking about using the word Progressive instead I was one of them because you wanted to run away from all of this fire breathing now I think we can use liberal more calmly I think that you're no longer thinking that Fox News is going to say something against the very word but that took a while so I think sometimes it's just a matter of Cycles baby did you want Aunt too I'd love your opinion on that yeah I I don't think I have anything to add to that I do think yeah I I my brain was going to the next question or I apologize okay we'll go over here if we could pass just pass it down the aisle okay hi thank you hi my name is riman I'm from Jerusalem I'm a Palestinian and I've learned so many things from my Israeli friends including saying things in a way that's very raw and one of the things that struck me like you you referred to using the word religion in your book and there was like a little bit of a debate about it but the things that you described later like about that professor and so on sounds to me like that's like about burning the witch like that's what it is it's not like it it is burning the witch so we're we're like I'm I'm like completely like you know in our world we're not as sophisticated as it is in in America and it's like very very um like I receive a lot of groups American groups and I take them around in in Ramallah and the West Bank and so on and it's like oftentimes it's very tiring to be politically correct you know you can't you can't joke you can't say things authentically and really all it requires and and this is something that we learned in Jerusalem is compassion a little bit of compassion um an ability to listen you know I I'm like I'm not asking a question but I I was like like very yeah I'm I was a very provoked to like respond to yeah there are many people in this country who think that withdrawing that compassion and pretending not to understand humor and being that politically correct is an advance that you're at 1.0 and we're at 2.0 I question that because of the way you feel I don't think that you're primitive if you take my point I think that we have gone in this bizarre Schoenberg Picasso kind of direction that very few people are ever really gonna follow and so yeah I say yes yes okay can I just screw that a little I'm um I'm a good buddy named Ebu Patel who some people may know who comes to Aspen ideas frequently and we were having a conversation Ebu and I have he does Interfaith work uh we have the similar kind of personality which is despite the fact that I went into Political punditry reasonably non-confrontational uh and we both had the realization frankly in 2020 that the other kind of people who we don't tend to be like who are confrontational who do get really angry at Injustice and who do some crazy stuff sometimes there is a role for people who are just really going to take a sledgehammer to the corrupt system sometime yes definitely that's how change has to happen sometimes yeah so what you're calling woke isn't that just a version of the excessive people who were justifiably Furious about things that were existing in America that's just it I don't think so and that might make me this fuddy-duddy who can't pull the camera far enough back but things needed to happen in say the 1960s the Black Panthers took it too far but the statement that they made made it clear to a lot of White America that some things really needed to change including attitudes you go from the Black Panthers to the new white attitudes depicted in the TV show Maude and All in the Family for example I don't think anybody we didn't need a carry nation of race in 2020. I thought we were moving along pretty quickly in many ways we didn't need to be that mean then I'd be interested in the case that we did and especially in about 10 years but that's just a I take your points you wrote a column that 1966 was a pivotal woman in the civil rights that it was more Martin Luther King and it became more black panthers and that was the pivotal year okay right here hello Jade Sands here um I am in shock actually just just a tad about what you just said um in terms of the Black Panther Party taking it too far can you first explain to me what you mean by that the guns carried openly breaking into the capital and then some of the things that they ended up doing to each other all people take it too far to an extent so it's not that's not their whole Legacy yes go ahead okay okay um so yes I hear Ing and the reason why they carried their guns was one to protect themselves to protect their families their houses were being raided set on fire people are being killed so it was a way for them to take ownership of their lives actually um so I'm just when you say that it kind it kind of hurts a little bit because these were a group of people that were trying to create their own political party trying to save themselves trying to provide meals for kids and it sounds it's almost like you're putting a negative um connotation on this group of people that were actually in so much pain and strife and they just wanted to stand up for themselves yeah being attacked by their government that was supposed to protect them so we as people are here to protect ourselves right um so it's like we will not do harm to you but harm was being put on us um and so that was just a comment from there but something I was thinking about before is do we have any language that can just be sacred to us right so when I think about woke when I think about some of these terms that we as people of color use and then our culture is always taken from us and then misused or weaponized right so is there any part of our language that can just be for us there is um a dictionary being composed right now of black English it's being headed by Henry Lewis gates at Harvard um it's going to be one of these books that hurts when you drop it on your foot it's got lots and lots and lots of words white people have taken a few can't we let them take a few we have a huge cultural Legacy of language that nobody will ever take of course some words are going to leak it's not a problem if I may I think we need to stop telling each other that it's a problem if black people say woke if black people say ratchet if black people say six or seven other things we don't have anything to worry about well but what let me ask so what's what's a white person both supposed to think about this dictionary what what's what's a white person supposed to think about this like when skip Gates comes out of the dictionary I think okay these are the words I can't use like well that's not what he would be saying yeah it's a it's going to be a big beautiful book okay I think I see a question right there and then we'll come down okay hi um I was wondering if you could speak more in depth to this uh sort of inversion of marxist's ideology and left discourse where they will talk about like every form of privilege power impression except for class and sort of how easily that kind of grafts on to like Elite meritocratic institutions um and then becomes a tool potentially of sort of like class advancement and just sort of like interpersonal strife well don't Dave do you do you I do you want to say something to that I have something too but I feel like you well on my your route allowed to talk everything but but class yeah yeah I do I do think I think you've written about it but I think I've written about it too that the left migrated from unions and worker movements to the university in The Faculty Lounge right and the faculty Lounge doesn't really control wages they don't have anything to say about worker rights or worker safety but they know a lot about language and so language became the thing that became all important as the center of modern progressivism and I think that was a mistake because what's important is who becomes less poor as opposed to the color and and power of the rhetoric it's so easy for human beings to forget that and that's part of that's part of what that is I think yeah now I point it inaccurately let's go here and then we're going to come down here good afternoon and thank you both for this wonderful conversation my name is Danita I work in non-profit management but I like to read and write and I appreciate the value of words and I appreciate the value of relationships I was a little late for this session so you might have addressed this already what is the role in relationships as people think about what words are acceptable and not acceptable and how important is the Town Square the proverbial Town Square for bringing people together and talking about what words mean to them and how they're affected by words and finding some common ground and common language and understanding each other just quickly I'll tell a story of a friend I have a friend who's Guatemalan and Honduran he prefers Hispanic his older sister prefers Latino and that's something I know from talking to them directly and understanding them so how can we get to that level of understanding in our lives again hard though Danita because there was a time when we learned that one says Latino not Hispanic and Asian not Oriental now Oriental became Unthinkable that just vanished within like a month Hispanic many of us the over-educated folk felt was the same thing only to gradually learn depending especially if you live in a neighborhood where everybody speaks Spanish that Hispanic didn't die among the people themselves which shows that whoever thought that Latino was going to change something what do you say about the fact that most people who are are still using the word that a certain group of people can't which just shows that it should always be more about the thought than the language but generally these things are subconscious there is not language doesn't change when people get into a Town Square usually even online things happen because of drift and socio-historical happenstance and then you wake up one day and you realize now that word means this and you might want to talk about how you feel about it but we can't drive that car it's rare that that happens sloppy answer book okay we'll start the the front Ray on the front here as you're saying that though there was a Republican senator I can't remember who it was awake guy said he was praising I'm not quite terrorism okay Tim Scott Tim Scott uh but he was praised attempting to praise I don't know a black man I think and he used the word articulate now you've got to be reasonably ignorant of what that word means in that context and you've probably not hanging around a lot of diverse communities if you use that word so in some sense relationships are a bit of the Cure you it's a how can I be considerate to you which you learned by being in diverse circles David though wasn't it Biden about Obama it was it was this was a subsequent case fine yes I think and you know it's really annoying to be an educated black person and called articulate and then people and if you are articulate people tell you but you are articulate but it doesn't matter because it's not one of the 75 things they would notice about you if you weren't if you weren't black when you never see anybody white being called articulate it doesn't matter to you that you actually are articulate yeah that's extremely annoying and it got around a lot because of Biden saying it and then Harry Reid said something rather similar and as a result I don't hear that as much now and so in the Town Square people talked about this business of not wanting to be called articulate I wrote about it in a couple of places and so change happens slowly and that was one case where there was kind of a Town Square it was the new Republic basically but it can happen yeah I correct myself I don't know if it's on um first uh Hispanic includes Spain Latino is for folks who are in Latin America so that's first latinx is for those who want to be inclusive of others because Spanish is a gendered language Latino is plural for everybody there's a couple of comments that were said one about you can't be politically correct because you can't joke I'm real funny I don't need to be offensive okay y'all follow me on the internet y'all will laugh continuously I'm not offending people or making them feel hurt another comment that was said is that words don't really matter we can let people use them but they do matter and in the South they matter a lot and if you're seeing the laws that are written the every single word matters it allows us to vote it allows us to not vote it allows us to be buried killed and right now today in Jackson Mississippi there's a sign that's dedicated to Emmett Till that gets shot up almost every other week I say this because it's important for us to have this conversation about what we own but we cannot say that words don't matter when it matters certainly when it comes to a legality of it so when you guys are out here having this conversation and almost dismissing people's feelings because of the words that they associate themselves with I think it's super valuable for us to have a real conversation especially in this space because I was in a lot of conversations already where black was whispered you can stay black okay and there are black Latinos and there are black asians and there are people that matter and so I do want to be conscious of my friends here of my fellow fellows who are feeling that this conversation is dismissing the power of words on feelings especially when every single word matters when we're writing laws when we're getting sued when we're able to own property when we're able to sell property when we're able to be actual citizens right because even though we pay taxes it doesn't matter if someone is a citizen or not so I'm really I really wanted to make sure that that's good Jenny I hear where you're coming from but if I may of course do you really do you really hear me as linguist and David as writer saying simply words don't matter aren't you oversimplifying what we said no I'm I'm afraid I'm afraid freed you are I'm I'm simplifying the way that you have realize this space to kind of negate the power of the word world that of how other people we're going down the middle and we're talking about moderation there's a difference but I think there is we'll do one more go around we're out of time yeah for sure I think there is a difference too when you're saying words can be used to across cultures right everybody loves Margaritas we got it everybody knows that word but how many people can really sit there and talk about the intricacies of the racism that they have felt by just simply being racism looks different for people who don't experience it so that's why I'm saying yes I'm hearing no one's denying any of those things I mean if you do then you're crazy right and that word is also really powerful so why while I'm sitting here and I'm feeling the feeling of my fellow people here I just want to acknowledge that when we're saying this conversation about woke about words about everything we're actively seeing these things happen legally across the United States and now we're seeing it reflected in other countries okay so thank you for the time thank you I wanted to get that in so do you have any more any no no I don't response yeah okay well we are at a time um um I thank you for as co-moderators uh for your the last 30 minutes and um thank you John McWhorter thank you David thank you folks

Channel: The Aspen Institute

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Id: 7brS6N7RDqY

Length: 51min 18sec (3078 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 29 2023