I’ve often spoken about how language reflects prejudice. As a black person I often feel on the wrong end of that in an Anglo-Saxon/European culture. There is this weird inconsistency in the English language regarding its references to the colour black. Generally black is bad, white is good. Financially if you are in the red, that’s bad – but if you are in the black that’s good, yet during the crisis that hit the UK government in 1992 when we exited the ERM, financially a bad day, it was referred to as “black Wednesday”, and to further the inconsistency, we now celebrate – in the retail centric sense, Black Friday after the US Thanksgiving. There are frequently negative connotations associated with colour, but actually as humans we have so much more capacity to use language more accurately and communicate effectively.
However, it has to be remembered that black people are not the only people stereotyped and marginalised by the use of language. Just this week on Al Jazeera I saw an article about the Washington Redskins. Not being a follower of American Football myself, I’d never considered the angle this story revealed, and had always considered The Redskins name as being loosely synonymous with the colour of their kit. But when you look closely at the emblems on the kit, the team mascots and paraphernalia associated with The Redskins – it points to a kind of Native American Indian theme, which some Native American Indians feel offended by.
We have this odd thing going on in society regarding skin colour. White people are not actually white – the name flesh as a colour doesn’t mean anything as there are many different colours and shades of flesh. SImilarly, black people are generally brown, of various hues and Indian People, native American or otherwise are not at all red, similarly – people of Chinese decent are not yellow… It seems to me, if colour is important, we should probably at least be accurate about the colour names we use.
Now that I know Native American Indians are offended by these terms, I won’t be using them – and I think in order to make our society more responsible in its use of language, all people who are demeaned and marginalised by certain words and linguistic forms should band together to protest, teach and correct others about this. If pressure isn’t applied against the this kind of thing, it will just go on unchallenged, perpetuating the crass insensitivity and/or blindness of a majority group which is adamantly slow to change.
Vide and further reading “NFL Team name causes outrage in the US“, courtesy Al Jazeera.