When you\u2019re talking about social-justice issues, and you want to refer to a particular group or kind of people, I recommend being careful to refer specifically to the kind of people that you mean, rather than just saying \u201cpeople.\u201d<\/p>\r\n
(\u2026This note is primarily addressed to people who have relatively more privilege, and especially to us white people; I don\u2019t see the word \u201cpeople\u201d used generically as often by people who have relatively less privilege.)<\/p>\r\n
For example:<\/p>\r\n
In diversity\/equity\/inclusion discussions at work, I fairly often encounter remarks like this:<\/p>\r\n
\u201cIt\u2019s okay if the discussion makes people uncomfortable.\u201d<\/p>\r\n
In that context, the person who\u2019s speaking (usually a white person) generally means something like \u201cit\u2019s okay if the discussion makes people who have more privilege<\/em> feel uncomfortably aware of their privilege.\u201d But this particular phrasing could just as easily be used to mean something like \u201cit\u2019s okay if the discussion includes discriminatory remarks, and thereby makes people with less privilege feel uncomfortable.\u201d<\/p>\r\n In this particular context, I can usually be pretty sure sure that they meant the former rather than the latter. But there\u2019s always a little uncertainty for me, which could be resolved if the speaker were more specific about which people they were referring to.<\/p>\r\n And that context is far from the only situation where I see this issue; that\u2019s just one example.<\/p>\r\n There\u2019s also another, more insidious, aspect to this phrasing issue:<\/p>\r\n If you use the unmodified word \u201cpeople\u201d when you really mean (for example) \u201cwhite people,\u201d then you\u2019re implying that the default person is white. If you furthermore never use the unmodified word \u201cpeople\u201d when you really mean (for example) \u201cBlack people,\u201d then you\u2019re implying even more strongly that people who aren\u2019t white are something different from ordinary default people. You may even be implying that people who aren\u2019t white aren\u2019t people at all.<\/p>\r\n So whenever you\u2019re tempted to use a general word like \u201cpeople\u201d in this kind of discussion, pause and think about which people in particular you\u2019re referring to, and try to be more specific about that.<\/p>\r\n I feel like the practice of making myself be more specific about what people I mean can also help clarify my thinking, and can help me say what I\u2019m trying to say more precisely and clearly, and can sometimes help me recognize when I\u2019m not noticing my own privilege.<\/p>\r\n There may well be times in social-justice contexts when \u201cpeople\u201d (without any kind of modifier) is the right word to use. But most of the time, I think it\u2019s not.<\/p>\r\n PS: This issue is also closely tied to the question of who the speaker\u2019s assumed audience is.<\/p>\r\n I regularly see social-justice-related articles and posts that are addressed to a \u201cyou\u201d without specifying who the \u201cyou\u201d is\u2014and in many of those cases, it gradually becomes clear that the \u201cyou\u201d is (for example) white people. But the white author took it for granted (probably without consciously thinking about it) that of course the only people who would be reading this piece would be white people.<\/p>\r\n So even if the piece doesn\u2019t use the word \u201cpeople,\u201d it can run into the same kind of issues that I\u2019m talking about.<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18548","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language","category-politics"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18548","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18548"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18548\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18549,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18548\/revisions\/18549"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18548"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18548"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18548"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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