Right, but that’s just the issue I was getting at. The examples you gave like “cotton-pickin” are specifically associated with slavery.
So what seems weird here is that “field work” doesn’t seem to have any specific association with slavery, any more than the word “ship” or “chain”. Obviously talking about ships or chains might trigger someone. But if that’s the case, then surely seeing an actual chain or a ship or seeing a person working in a field would too. So… I just don’t see what the plan is here. We aren’t going to stop using chains or ships or working in fields.
I had at least one branch of my family that were wealthy cotton farmers, but that isn’t the branch I’m directly from. My branch actually were migrant farmers before the 30s. There was a story of one of my aunts whining “But I don’t wannnnnnnna pick cotton!” while she rode out to the fields on a sack at three years old (she wasn’t going to pick cotton, she just had to ride along on the sack while my grandpa picked cotton). Heck, they remember the depression as relatively good times, because my grandfather’s employment was steady and not migrant work.
Now, both of my grandpas were racist as hell. Both my grandmothers weren’t. All four used cotton-pickin’ as an expletive, even though half of them had done it themselves to survive. To them (and to me) it just seemed like a way to express the lowest rung of society. It’s disparaging of class, not race to me.
But nobody’s objecting to the use of “field” to describe an actual field. The problem is with figurative language, where (say) “field” is used as a term to evoke a place where hard and unrewarding but necessary work is done; the whole point, supposedly, is to invoke not fields as such but fields as the locus of slavery.
Now, the association isn’t that striking to me — if you say “field” as the locus of operations, I think first of all of an army in the field. But, then, I’m neither American nor Black. If people who are sensitised to, and injured by, the evocation of associations like this find that those associations are evoked by this idiom, then the right thing to do is to find another idiom. That is not the same thing as not using “field” for a field, “chain” for a chain, etc.
That simply isn’t what field work means. It means going out to observe or interview to gather data for research purposes. There’s no connotation whatsoever of it being hard and unrewarding.
So no, I don’t see how there is any more connection between the expression “field work” and slavery than there is between “field” and slavery.
As an engineer who traveled extensively during my career, field work meant being outside of the office. It was way more fun and interesting and challenging in general than office work.
It’s the dull but necessary gathering of data, contrasted the much more interesting analysis/discussion of what the data means, as I understand it.
For what it’s worth, my reaction is similar to yours. When I saw this story first, my reaction was “Wait, what? Why?” It had never occurred to me that this idiom might be problematic and, when I heard it was, I couldn’t think why.
But while the “it’s political correctness/wokery gone mad!” brigade might be tempted to leave it at that, I think we have to consider the possibility that this move wasn’t dreamed up in the abstract; that there are people who find the phrase problematic because it evokes for them associations which it does not evoke for you or me, and that they drew attention to the problem. And, all other things being equal, we should prefer language that doesn’t affect people this way over language that does.
We had a possibly similar issue in Australia a few years back where a popular chain of fried chicken fast food joints, which is a significant sponsor of cricket in Australia, ran a TV ad campaign depicting two Australians at an Australia-West Indies cricket game, bonding with the initially hostile West Indies fans around them by sharing their branded fried chicken with them.
Fried chicken has no particular racial or class associations in Australia, where the ad was run, but apparently it does in America and, I don’t know, possibly in the West Indies also. Uproar ensued and the ad was pulled, possibly because it was damaging the brand in the US. I still don’t understand exactly what the pejorative associations are, but I don’t need to; it’s enough to know that they exist.
The point is, different people will react differently to language or images, depending on their national, racial, class, cultural, etc background. The fact that a word or image doesn’t have offensive connotations for me isn’t normative. If other people say it has offensive connotations for them, I default to taking them at their word and prefer to find another way of expressing myself.
That’s not at all how I’ve ever heard the term. Maybe you use it differently in Australia. It’s simply work that is done out of the office. No judgment on its worth or dullness or difficulty.
I guess the relevant question is, what does it mean to professional social workers? But we do have the data point of Spice_Weasel, a social worker who struggles to perceive the problem with this term.
And yet, to follow your analogy, nobody has suggested that we stop talking about fried chicken in any context or invent another word for it or stop eating it. Nobody imagines that fried chicken is inherently racist, even if in some contexts it can be.
I can quite imagine someone buying chains at a hardware store using the situation to be horrifically racist to a Black store employee. The problem would be the racist customer, and nobody would suggest that we stop selling chains or find a new word for them.
I can equally imagine a racist professor mocking a Black student by telling them to go out and do some FIELD WORK with heavy emphasis. Likewise, the solution is surely to fire the professor, not to try to excise the inherently innocuous expression “field work” from the language. But if something like this has actually happened, then I’d understand the school both firing the professor and out of an abundance of caution deprecating use of the expression altogether.
For a geologist, field work is the fun and desired part. I certainly don’t associate that with drudgery.
But if enough credible people tell me they did, and that it hurt them, I’d drop the term.
“Credible”, there, would be some African-Americans I respected, though, not some anonymous academic department. I can’t find any info that links the USC statement to actual human persons.
I read somewhere that USC School of Social Work is under fire because it’s been operating as a degree mill, targeting young people of colour on low incomes, all but guaranteeing them a well-paid career and saddling them with enormous debts. Then it turns out that a USC Social Work Masters doesn’t reliably lead to career employment.
Heck, I’ll be good and actually go and find a cite:
Over the last decade, USC partnered with for-profit company 2U Inc. to develop its online social work master’s program and recruit students for the two-year degree, which last year cost $115,000. USC developed demeaning marketing profiles of potential students, targeted low-income students of color and recruited candidates with low grades to meet enrollment targets, according to a Wall Street Journal report.
Enrollment boomed but the fallout tarnished the program’s reputation and left graduates with staggering debt.
In a comparison with other master’s degree programs at top-tier U.S. universities, the USC social work degree had one of the worse combinations of debt and earnings, according to the Journal’s analysis. Recent USC social work graduates who took out federal loans borrowed a median of $112,000; half of them were earning $52,000 or less two years later.
(If you’ve got access tot he linked WSJ article, I believe that’s got testimony from actual students caught up in this.)
So in this case its at least plausible that the much heralded change from “field work” to “practicum” is honest to god original brand virtue-signalling. Not as in doing something good in public, but as in making a big deal of a cheap and easy superficial move to cover up for much more egregious institutional problems. Because it seems that of all the issues its students of colour have with the USC Social Work School, terminology might be quite low down the list.
I couldn’t find any press release in the School of Social Work’s own site about this, but I did note that they seem to have used the words “field work” and “field practicum” interchangeably for years. But not really “practicum” by itself much.
I am not an actual licensed social worker but have always worked in social-work adjacent jobs - “field work” does not mean the dull but necessary gathering of data contrasted with analysis/discussion. . For someone still in school, it means work outside of the classroom that would in other fields/situations be referred to as an internship or externship. (although in my experience , that’s usually called a “field placement” not “field work”).
For someone in the working world, it means most work that is being done out of the office - it isn’t typically used for jobs where a social worker is providing therapy in an office as if he or she were operating a private practice or in a hospital as a discharge planner but instead for jobs where a social worker/caseworker is visiting the foster homes they supervise and that sort of thing. For jobs that involve field work ( including those outside of social work) , it is an integral part of the job and if you consider it to be “dull but necessary” , you aren’t suited to that sort of job - it’s hard to imagine an archaeologist who thinks digs are dull.
Excellent point. Is this the result of actual concerns from those, to use the previous phrasing, “out in the field”, or is it literally an academic exercise.
OK so, no maybe, I am prejudiced about for-profits in education, right there I said “uh-oh, what’s coming must not be good…”
The introduction to Nanook of the North mentions a “Moose Factory half-breed” [Métis]. Not familiar with the local names, but that sounds super racist to me; not sure what it implied at the time.
When I worked for an exam development company, “field testing” was a category of exam questions that were issued in new exams, but they weren’t graded. Their statistics were analyzed to determine whether they were good enough to be included as permanent questions.
Until very recently that term was often used across the English-speaking countries for “mixed race” people who were part-native and even then it was not exactly kind. (See also the song by Cher. )