There’s a difference between “labels should never change” (which you say Scott is saying, but he isn’t) and “the thing where a previously harmless label becomes offensive, not because it was really offensive all along, but because someone has decided to try to make it offensive and then there’s a positive feedback loop, generally does more harm than good” (which he is saying).
Per (4) in the OP, I think this process that Scott describes is simply an incorrect model of why some words for minority groups come to be seen as derogatory and why the acceptable words change. His account of how the label “Black” was popularized, for example, just seems factually incorrect from what I can glean from some cursory reading online,
My own cursory reading mostly leaves me aware that I don’t really know a lot of important things about how the process happened.
It seems clearly correct that before about 1966 pretty much everyone, of every race and political persuasion, was using “Negro” as the default term. Scott says “fifty years ago” and I think he must have meant sixty (50 years ago was 1973, by which time the process was mostly complete) but otherwise I think he’s plainly right about this.
It seems generally agreed that Stokely Carmichael / Kwame Ture was the key mover in getting “Negro” toppled and “black” replacing it, and that this process started in 1966 with his famous “Black Power” speech (in which I don’t think he makes any particular argument about “black” versus “Negro”, but he uses “black” throughout).
In his book, SC/KT claims that “there is a growing resentment” of the term “Negro”. Maybe that was true and he was more a symptom than a cause of the shift in preferences. Or maybe he just said it for the same reason as Donald Trump loves to say “a lot of people are saying …”.
It’s hard to tell what the actual mechanism was. It must have been some combination of (1) people being convinced by SC/KT’s arguments that the term “Negro” was “the invention of our oppressor” and therefore describes “_his_ image of us”, and that “black” is therefore better; (2) black people trying out “black” and, separately from any arguments about the theoretical merits, just liking it better than “negro”; (3) people just imitating other people because that’s a thing people do; (4) white people switching to “black” because (in reality and/or their perception) black people preferred it; (5a) people wanting to use a term that was increasingly a signifier of being in favour of social justice and civil rights; and (5b) people not wanting to use a term that was increasingly a signifier of not being in favour of social justice and civil rights.
Scott’s post is about both branches of mechanism 5. It’s hard for the process to get started that way. (There can’t be much social pressure to use term X rather than term Y if hardly anyone is using term Y yet. You could get a situation where the use of Y begins within some small but influential group, and takes over larger and larger groups by mechanism 5a and then 5b. But I doubt that’s common.) I don’t think it can avoid finishing that way. (Consider the situation now. If someone showed me an incredibly persuasive argument that “negro” was really a much better term to use for black people than “black”, I almost certainly wouldn’t start using it however convinced I was, because if I did I would immediately be branded a racist. That’s mechanism 5b.)
So. I assume the negro->black switch got started by mechanism 1 (that being the one that works most effectively before there are a bunch of people already using the new term) and then continued by some combination of all the mechanisms, with an increasing amount of 5b in the mix as the transition proceeded.
… Which leaves so many questions whose answers are (I think) unclear.
Was the process in this case a bad thing overall, as we should probably expect on Scott’s model? (Bad: risk of mis-classifying people as racist whose only sin was not to adjust their language quickly enough; inconvenience during the transition; awkwardness after the transition of reading material written before it. Good: morale-boosting effects on black people of feeling that they were using a term of their own choosing and taking more control of their own destiny; if SC/KT was correct about “negro” bringing along unwanted associations etc., then some degree of escape from those associations.)
Was there actually anything to SC/KT’s claim that the term “negro” was more “the invention of our oppressor” than “black”, or his suggestion that using “black” was a way of escaping unwelcome and unfair stereotypes? (My guess, and I think also Scott’s, is no to both. But I could easily be wrong. And of course if a community has internalized hostile stereotyping, there’s value in anything that feels like a reason to discard that, even if in some theoretical sense it isn’t a very good reason.)
Was the negro->black switch actually brought about by SC/KT, as commonly believed? Or did SC/KT merely draw attention to something that was happening anyway (and maybe make it happen faster, but not change whether it happened)?
How much of the process was driven by mechanisms 5a and 5b, which Scott treats as the main drivers, versus mechanisms 1-4?
When Scott says that SC/KT picked “black” in the hope of scaring white people, is that correct at all? (I suspect that the phrase black power may have been picked with that intention, but not the word black itself, and wonder whether Scott may have misunderstood something; but I have no evidence either way.)
I haven’t seen—but, again, my reading too has been pretty cursory—anything that answers these, and depending on the answers my opinion could be anywhere from “Scott’s account is basically correct, although there are a few inaccuracies and I don’t much like the tone of some of it” to “Scott’s account isn’t 100% wrong but the mechanism he says was the most important one was actually only relevant in the mopping-up phase once the shift had basically happened by other mechanisms, and his reasons for not wanting to go along with a ‘hyperstitious slur cascade’ basically don’t apply here”.
If your reading has turned up things that clarify some of those points, I’d be interested.
Was the process in this case a bad thing overall, as we should probably expect on Scott’s model? (Bad: risk of mis-classifying people as racist whose only sin was not to adjust their language quickly enough; inconvenience during the transition; awkwardness after the transition of reading material written before it. Good: morale-boosting effects on black people of feeling that they were using a term of their own choosing and taking more control of their own destiny; if SC/KT was correct about “negro” bringing along unwanted associations etc., then some degree of escape from those associations.)
My contention is that changing the words we use for minority groups is not a bad thing overall because the costs are low and the benefits are high. This is what the OP attempted to establish with points (1) through (4).
I don’t think Scott ever claims that changing the words we use for minority groups is a bad thing overall.
His post is not only about changing the words for minority groups, and he explicitly says that the sort of change he’s talking about sometimes happens for excellent reasons (he gives the example of how “Jap” became offensive in the 1950s).
Per (4) in the OP, I think this process that Scott describes is simply an incorrect model of why some words for minority groups come to be seen as derogatory and why the acceptable words change. His account of how the label “Black” was popularized, for example, just seems factually incorrect from what I can glean from some cursory reading online,
My own cursory reading mostly leaves me aware that I don’t really know a lot of important things about how the process happened.
It seems clearly correct that before about 1966 pretty much everyone, of every race and political persuasion, was using “Negro” as the default term. Scott says “fifty years ago” and I think he must have meant sixty (50 years ago was 1973, by which time the process was mostly complete) but otherwise I think he’s plainly right about this.
It seems generally agreed that Stokely Carmichael / Kwame Ture was the key mover in getting “Negro” toppled and “black” replacing it, and that this process started in 1966 with his famous “Black Power” speech (in which I don’t think he makes any particular argument about “black” versus “Negro”, but he uses “black” throughout).
In his book, SC/KT claims that “there is a growing resentment” of the term “Negro”. Maybe that was true and he was more a symptom than a cause of the shift in preferences. Or maybe he just said it for the same reason as Donald Trump loves to say “a lot of people are saying …”.
It’s hard to tell what the actual mechanism was. It must have been some combination of (1) people being convinced by SC/KT’s arguments that the term “Negro” was “the invention of our oppressor” and therefore describes “_his_ image of us”, and that “black” is therefore better; (2) black people trying out “black” and, separately from any arguments about the theoretical merits, just liking it better than “negro”; (3) people just imitating other people because that’s a thing people do; (4) white people switching to “black” because (in reality and/or their perception) black people preferred it; (5a) people wanting to use a term that was increasingly a signifier of being in favour of social justice and civil rights; and (5b) people not wanting to use a term that was increasingly a signifier of not being in favour of social justice and civil rights.
Scott’s post is about both branches of mechanism 5. It’s hard for the process to get started that way. (There can’t be much social pressure to use term X rather than term Y if hardly anyone is using term Y yet. You could get a situation where the use of Y begins within some small but influential group, and takes over larger and larger groups by mechanism 5a and then 5b. But I doubt that’s common.) I don’t think it can avoid finishing that way. (Consider the situation now. If someone showed me an incredibly persuasive argument that “negro” was really a much better term to use for black people than “black”, I almost certainly wouldn’t start using it however convinced I was, because if I did I would immediately be branded a racist. That’s mechanism 5b.)
So. I assume the negro->black switch got started by mechanism 1 (that being the one that works most effectively before there are a bunch of people already using the new term) and then continued by some combination of all the mechanisms, with an increasing amount of 5b in the mix as the transition proceeded.
… Which leaves so many questions whose answers are (I think) unclear.
Was the process in this case a bad thing overall, as we should probably expect on Scott’s model? (Bad: risk of mis-classifying people as racist whose only sin was not to adjust their language quickly enough; inconvenience during the transition; awkwardness after the transition of reading material written before it. Good: morale-boosting effects on black people of feeling that they were using a term of their own choosing and taking more control of their own destiny; if SC/KT was correct about “negro” bringing along unwanted associations etc., then some degree of escape from those associations.)
Was there actually anything to SC/KT’s claim that the term “negro” was more “the invention of our oppressor” than “black”, or his suggestion that using “black” was a way of escaping unwelcome and unfair stereotypes? (My guess, and I think also Scott’s, is no to both. But I could easily be wrong. And of course if a community has internalized hostile stereotyping, there’s value in anything that feels like a reason to discard that, even if in some theoretical sense it isn’t a very good reason.)
Was the negro->black switch actually brought about by SC/KT, as commonly believed? Or did SC/KT merely draw attention to something that was happening anyway (and maybe make it happen faster, but not change whether it happened)?
How much of the process was driven by mechanisms 5a and 5b, which Scott treats as the main drivers, versus mechanisms 1-4?
When Scott says that SC/KT picked “black” in the hope of scaring white people, is that correct at all? (I suspect that the phrase black power may have been picked with that intention, but not the word black itself, and wonder whether Scott may have misunderstood something; but I have no evidence either way.)
I haven’t seen—but, again, my reading too has been pretty cursory—anything that answers these, and depending on the answers my opinion could be anywhere from “Scott’s account is basically correct, although there are a few inaccuracies and I don’t much like the tone of some of it” to “Scott’s account isn’t 100% wrong but the mechanism he says was the most important one was actually only relevant in the mopping-up phase once the shift had basically happened by other mechanisms, and his reasons for not wanting to go along with a ‘hyperstitious slur cascade’ basically don’t apply here”.
If your reading has turned up things that clarify some of those points, I’d be interested.
I think this is the crux of the matter:
My contention is that changing the words we use for minority groups is not a bad thing overall because the costs are low and the benefits are high. This is what the OP attempted to establish with points (1) through (4).
(I elaborated more in a separate comment.)
I don’t think Scott ever claims that changing the words we use for minority groups is a bad thing overall.
His post is not only about changing the words for minority groups, and he explicitly says that the sort of change he’s talking about sometimes happens for excellent reasons (he gives the example of how “Jap” became offensive in the 1950s).