National linguist and political commentator rejects wild woke claims against D3's Irene Smith
"If one is inclined to find racism everywhere, one will find it everywhere," says Dr. Alan Perlman, national commenter on the politicization of race in the U.S. We asked Dr. Perlman to take a look at the overheated race charges against Irene Smith in D3. Perlman thinks they don't add up and asks everyone to “chill out.”
I took the flyers at face value. The captions above the pictures of three White women and two “people of color” were clearly leveraging, on the one side, political endorsement-by-label (“leading moderate women officeholders” – the first two adjectives are open to debate, but all four are presented as equally valid); and, on the other, attack-by-association and -position (supports someone who wants to defund police).
But not everyone is so literal. Some reactions branded the depiction of people, in particular the distribution of Black men and White women, to be “racist.” One commentator called it a “hit piece.”
Our society has, to use the current buzzwords, politicized and weaponized language as never before. People invest words with great power and use them to attack and divide.
Certainly racist and its derivatives are daily examples. And once again, we are in the realm of manufactured insult. Recently, we learned that “looting” can be perceived to have racist overtones. For more, see the politically-correct exegesis of “looting” here.
Let’s be clear: The word racism has been generalized, from actual, real-world racism (the sincere belief that one race, however sloppily defined, is superior to another, leading to [action is essential, not just thoughts] the deprivation of civil rights and liberties, and even the lives, of the hated group)… to include perceived racism (you are just as bad as the people who practiced the real thing).
Racism has been reduced to a thought-crime. It’s an argument closer. Once you’re identified as a member of the hated group, even by accusation, you have no rights. Also: If one is inclined to find racism everywhere, one will find it everywhere.
The depicted grouping of sexes and races is outside language itself, in the world of signal-meaning called “semiotics.”
As with language, symbols can be specific (a brand or trademark) or vague, even subjective. That’s what’s happening here: Insult is manufactured from innocuous symbols.
But as one local commentator wrote, “I see friendships and camaraderie, not race.”
As a linguist and lover of social harmony, I call upon everybody to chill out and stop calling anything “racist” that is not the real thing, as defined above. We should not be using words as weapons.
Perlman is a NH-based forensic linguist and commentator on language. More about him can be found here.
Read the whole thing here.
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