I think that is beautifully put.
The problem is that accusations of various forms of bigotry are quite often used to pre-emptively shut down debate and discussion. It’s absolutely ridiculous and unhealthy to a free society to give unfounded accusations that sort of power. It’s hard to believe that those who advocate a society that is so constrained are acting in good faith.
Just out of curiosity, in situations where person A says XYZ, and person B says XYZ is racist, if person A is able to prove, definitively, that XYZ is actually not racist, does person B have a moral obligation to apologise to person A and promise to do better? I would say they do, but threads like this make me wonder if society at large agrees.
Having actually been “person A” on two separate occasions, and having not received anything which even smelt like an apology either time, I’m a little sensitive to the fact that the social pressure to apologise upon being accused of racism isn’t mirrored by an equivalent social pressure to apologise for levelling false accusations, even after the accusation has been shown to be nonsense. But maybe my experiences aren’t representative.
If B is sitting, minding his own business, and A comes by and trips over B’s foot, should A apologize for saying “ouch” when he hits the floor?
Whether B should apologize depends, imo, on what he said. If he just said “XYZ is racist” i don’t think he owes A an apology, even if it turns out he misheard or misunderstood the intent of XYZ. If he said, “A, you are a horrible person, you just said XYZ, and that’s racist” then he should apologize.
And of course, it depends on whether A agrees with B’s judgement as to whether XYZ was racist. I’ve seen a lot of “proofs” that aren’t.
Without getting into the specifics of the incident I’m thinking of (because it’s long and not very interesting), it played out a little like this:
Me: “says a thing”
Jane: “That’s racist. I’m offended.”
Me: “It isn’t racist. You just don’t know what it means. Here’s the dictionary definition of the thing I just said. As you can see, its definition isn’t racist, nor is its etymology based in racism. That’s just a fact.
Jane: immediately changes the subject
Personally, I think Jane owed me an apology for presuming I was the kind of person to casually throw around racist terms in everyday conversation. However, there seems (in my opinion) to be very little social pressure for her to do that.
People who insist on wedging ‘niggardly’ into conversations and speeches know what they are doing.
That’s not what I did.
Is Jane a member of the race involved?
Also, in most such situations, Jane wouldn’t have said that if she thought you were an unrepentant racist. Those things are usually said to people one expects to care, people one thinks want to avoid racism in their speech. When people have said things like that to me, they were offering constructive feedback, not telling me they thought i was a bad person.
And, “that sounds racist out of context, to people who don’t know this obscure word” is constructive feedback. I have stopped using “niggardly” for this reason. Yeah, it’s a cool word, but “stingy” works, and i don’t have to worry about accidentally offending someone who overhears me that way.
I’d like to give a real example of this, from a discussion among friends on a discord server recently.
There was some chatter about “cargo cult programming”
A few days after that conversation, someone came in and said:
I’m very behind on this channel, but I did want to say I would appreciate if we didn’t use the term “cargo cult programming” in this venue. The term is based on a reference to “cargo cults”, which is an extremely problematic and pejorative term for a complicated phenomenon that rose out of colonialism.
One of the people who had used the phrase said
I had been familiar with “term for a complicated phenomenon that arose out of colonialism”, but hadn’t been familiar with “pejorative”. Today I learned.
The person who originally brought up the term replied
I’m happy to respect that, but curious if anyone knows another way to express the idea in question.
(The programming related idea, I mean, which is only metaphorically connected to the namesake.)
A discussion followed as to other ways to express the idea of using chunks of code without understanding them. The guy who originally used the term pointed out that he’d had to explain what he meant to some of us anyway, so maybe the phrase wasn’t actually all that helpful. Others thought it was, and returned to trying to come up with good replacements (it’s probably more understood within certain programming circles than it was in this broader community.)
One person jumped in to say
You need there to be a good replacement before you’ll drop something someone has just told you is offensive?
She was told “no”, everyone agreed they planned to stop using the term, but nonetheless wanted to think about who to best reproduce the meaning. An interesting conversation ensued, although no one came up with a term that everyone liked. No one apologized, and everyone remained friendly.
This is how “accusations that what you said are racist” play out in the liberal world.
My stance exactly.
Well, here’s how my story played out.
I belong to a writing club. There’s no restrictions on the kind of fiction we can submit. Sci-fi, horror, romance, poetry, it’s all on the table. Now, I’m a big (verging on obsessive, if I’m being honest) fan of Victorian era British writers like Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, the Brontes, and Henry James. I also love Steampunk, Retro-futurism, and other genres which employ a Victorian esthetic. Consequently, many of the stories I write are set in Victorian England, and the characters use expressions common to that time and place.
In one story, I used the expression “happy as a sandboy”. That’s an expression which has died out, but it was, to the best of my understanding, quite a common expression in mid 19th century Britain, with a meaning akin to “Happy as Larry”.
The expression comes from the old practise of sprinkling sand on the floors of pubs to soak up spillages. The sand would be delivered by the eponymous sandboy and, because it was thirsty work and they were delivering to pubs, they often took part payment in drink. Hence the phrase, “happy as a sandboy”.
The Jane in my story, a black woman, called me out for using the expression. She said “I appreciate the story takes place a long time ago, but I think it’s very inappropriate to use racist terms and expressions without comment”.
I had no idea what she was talking about and, when she identified “happy as a sandboy” as the offending phrase, I got my phone out and showed her that the expression has absolutely nothing to do with race. At which point she just sort of changed the subject.
To this day, I don’t know why she thought it was racist. Maybe she misheard and thought I said ‘Sambo’? Maybe she thought sandboy was a term for people from desert regions and, given the era in which the story was set, could only have been racist in origin? She didn’t say and I didn’t ask. I was very embarrassed and I’m not a confrontational person so I didn’t challenge her any further at the time beyond using Google to show that she was wrong.
The point is, she was wrong. Completely and unambiguously 100% factually incorrect. It may not be a common occurrence, but it is possible for people to see racism where it just simply isn’t there. Sometimes, people are just objectively wrong to be offended.
My impression (and I stress that I’m not stating this as objective fact) is that while there is, rightly, tremendous social pressure for people who (however unintentionally) say something racist to apologize, there’s no equivalent social pressure for people who make the accusation and get it totally wrong through their own ignorance to apologize to the people they’ve accused.
It just seems commonsensical that, if a social transgression is serious, then a factually incorrect accusation should merit an apology from the accuser commensurate to that which we’d expect from the accused if the accusation did, in fact, have merit. It’s also commonsensical that a policy of automatically deferring to the wisdom of the accuser can, on occasion, cause more problems than it solves.
So, I don’t think she owed you an apology. She was trying to communicate with you, not to accuse you of malfeasance.
And I assume she was offended by “sandboy”, because in the US, most “job-boy” constructs were terms used for slave men doing that job. Or at least, men at the bottom of the social hierarchy. (Curiously, that includes “cowboy”, a term that now has positive connotations.)
Because you reacted as if you’d been insulted, and not as if you appreciated feedback, she didn’t tell you why she was offended by the term. She just shut up, and racked it up as another microaggression, where her hurt went unacknowledged.
I certainly don’t think you meant any harm by using the term, but my advice would be that if you really want to use the phrase in the future, you introduce the word in advance, with a young white male as the sandboy, both to avoid inadvertently offending people, and also so your audience knows what the heck you are talking about.
That “if” is covering a lot of ground.
I agree with puzzlegal on this one. You weren’t being accused of being the equivalent of a Klan member. You were being offered a chance to improve your writing.
Being objectively wrong about the meaning, usage, and derivation of a particular phrase isn’t actually the same thing as being objectively wrong to be offended. The meaning and usage of a particular phrase may be entirely innocuous in the contexts of the person using it, but may not be from the context of the person objecting to it. I had never heard the particular phrase “happy as a sandboy”, and indeed I don’t believe I’d ever heard or read the term “sandboy” at all before reading your post. The use of the word “boy”, in the USA, for nonwhite adult males was a common racist use for many years, and still crops up occasionally. While it might have been better for her to ask whether the term was racist than to assume that it was, or to phrase it as ‘do you realize that readers may think this is a racist term’, I can easily see why someone might think it racist; and that might well include others among your readers.
When we do not have any conscious ill intent, there a very strong human instinct toward indignation that we were “falsely accused”. But for all of us who live with privilege, we MUST fight that instinct. We don’t live with the deeply-ingrained racism that’s part of our society every day. Even if someone takes offense through ignorance, even if they are unequivocally wrong on the “facts”, our first reaction must still be one of empathy rather than indignation, to understand and examine how that came about. The important thing is for all parties to gain wisdom, not a rigtheous dispute over who should apologize to whom.
So anyone with privilege should always be listening to other people’s lived experience. BUT - that certainly does not mean we should always treat someone from any historically marginalized group with kid gloves, with a patronizing attitude, as though they are so emotionally fragile that their cognitive abilities are impaired.
In @WalterBishop’s anecdote, I agree with @puzzlegal that the missing context here was an appreciation that “boy” has historical racist connotations in the U.S. So I think both parties here were ignorant of something. The desirable outcome is clearly (a) for @WalterBishop to gain insight into the historical connotations of the word “boy” and the potential for misunderstanding; and (b) for “Jane” to gain insight that “sandboy” specifically does not in fact have racist connotations, and that she jumped too quickly to that assumption. And quite honestly, if I were on either side of that exchange, my own instinct after my ignorance were fought would be to say “Ah, I’m so sorry, I did not realize that, I have learned something today.” There’s no obligation to do so, and I would not go into paroxysms of righteous indignation if they did not - but I’d think someone a bit of a jerk if they did not, whatever the color of their skin.
If I were on Jane’s side of the exchange, I’d be a lot more likely to produce an apology for my misunderstanding if the person using “sandboy” hadn’t come across as saying “you are completely and unambigously 100% factually incorrect”, but instead as saying they weren’t aware of any racist meaning for the term and giving the correct derivation, but also asking in an openminded fashion why Jane took it as racist instead of flat out assuming that it couldn’t reasonably be perceived as racist by anybody, anywhere, in any context.
It depends on how it is received. If I point out that “sandboy” sounds racist to me, and they say, “You know I didn’t think of it that way. It doesn’t come from a racist background, but now I can see how it would come across that way, I can probably pick a different term that will be less confusing and better received.” Then sure, both have learned something.
If the response is, “No it’s not! Look at this google, LOOK AT IT! It shows that you are wrong, and you owe me an apology for even suggesting that anything that I say could possibly be considered to be thought to be racist.” then the kindest thing to do at that point is to change the subject.
Otherwise, it turns into, “Well, okay, so maybe you’re not a racist, but you are an asshole.”
never mind
Fair enough, but if two people in an interaction act like jerks, the one who is the lesser jerk does not somehow attain virtue.
I think it’s a bad idea for people with privilege to act with immediate righteous indignation and assume that the proximate “facts” give a valid picture of other people’s experience of life.
I also think it’s a bad idea for people who come across words they have never heard before to jump to unwarranted conclusions. The facts here are nothing like (say) the word “niggardly”, which I fully agree should be expunged from our vocabulary. We have many perfectly innocuous words like newsboy, pageboy, bellboy, playboy, tomboy, cowboy. Jumping to the conclusion that xxxx-boy has racist connotations is something that I would feel a bit silly about when I reflected on it, and personally I would apologize if I had done that. I don’t claim to have the lived experiences of a Black person. I also don’t dismiss the cognitive ability of a Black person to grasp, just as I would, that this assumption was a bit silly.
Or how about if one is ignorant of a word don’t automatically assume one knows what it means and then turn on the offended switch? If I want to use a word, I’m not going to ask permission especially since more and more words are now suspect or being redefined.
Ultimately, the restriction of words is an attempt to restrict the free exchange of ideas and that is what needs to be kept in mind when folks are engaged in these ridiculous accusations.
In the scenario given above, the person choosing to be offended by “sandboy” is objectively wrong. To give way on the use of that word is to reinforce the expectation that people will do the same for other words in other objectively wrong situations.
You now have “sandboy” as a suspect term and, by implication, any other “-boy” can now also be challenged “legitimately”. Doesn’t sound like a great way to run a society where the ignorant get to police the language.