It isn’t true that Scott’s post doesn’t say why he thinks it’s bad (all else being equal) for the implications of words to shift in the way he describes.
Okay, but this process is bad, right?
Suppose someone decides tomorrow that “Asian” is a slur, and demands we call them “person of Asian descent”. Everyone agrees to go along with this for some reason, and fine, “Asian” is now a slur.
This seems bad for everybody. White people have to be on tenterhooks every time they talk to an Asian, trying their hardest to restrain from using the word they’re familiar with, and to remember the unwieldy gibberish that replaces it. If they fail, they have to feel bad, or worry that the local Asian community thinks they’re a racist. Meanwhile, Asians now have to police everyone else’s behavior, saying “Actually, that word is offensive, we prefer ‘person of Asian descent’” every time someone refers to them. When people get annoyed by this, they have to fret that the person is actually racist against them and trying to deliberately offend them. If they are the sort of person who is triggered by hearing slurs, they will have to be triggered several times a day as people adjust from the familiar language to the new. Meanwhile, dozens of organizations with names like the National Asian Alliance, Asian Community Center, or Asians For Biden will have to change their names. Old novels will need to include forewords apologizing for how in the old days people used to use insensitive terms, and we’re sorry we’re making you read a book with the word A***n in it. Some old people will refuse to change and get ostracized by society. This is just a bad time time on all sides.
Also, “it’s important not to change the words we use to refer to minority groups” isn’t what Scott is saying.
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).
Personally, I would want to distinguish between three variants of the “hyperstitious slur cascade”. (1) A word starts being used with hostile intent, which triggers the cascade. (Think “spastic”.) (2) Some other word starts being specifically favoured by the target group, so that all other words start to be used disproportionately by the hostile and prejudiced, which triggers the cascade. (If Scott’s account of the history is correct, then “Negro” is somewhere intermediate between 1 and 2. I don’t have a really clear-cut example of 2 to hand.) (3) Someone decides, for no very good reason, to start being offended by a word. (Think “field work”, though I don’t think the people who claimed that that term was offensive were actually successful in starting a hyperstition cascade.)
I would switch very early in a type-1 cascade, but later in a type-3 cascade. Type 2 is somewhere in between.
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).
It isn’t true that Scott’s post doesn’t say why he thinks it’s bad (all else being equal) for the implications of words to shift in the way he describes.
Also, “it’s important not to change the words we use to refer to minority groups” isn’t what Scott is saying.
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).
Personally, I would want to distinguish between three variants of the “hyperstitious slur cascade”. (1) A word starts being used with hostile intent, which triggers the cascade. (Think “spastic”.) (2) Some other word starts being specifically favoured by the target group, so that all other words start to be used disproportionately by the hostile and prejudiced, which triggers the cascade. (If Scott’s account of the history is correct, then “Negro” is somewhere intermediate between 1 and 2. I don’t have a really clear-cut example of 2 to hand.) (3) Someone decides, for no very good reason, to start being offended by a word. (Think “field work”, though I don’t think the people who claimed that that term was offensive were actually successful in starting a hyperstition cascade.)
I would switch very early in a type-1 cascade, but later in a type-3 cascade. Type 2 is somewhere in between.
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).
It would be much more helpful if Scott used a real example rather than a fictional one. I don’t think his fictional example is very realistic.