Phobias and Other Things

 

A phobia is an intense and unreasonable fear of something. In our time the word is used incorrectly and misleadingly to denote something else altogether. “Homophobia” has always been a silly term. The problem wasn’t that people were afraid of lesbians and gay men. Almost no one was. The problem was persecution of and discrimination against lesbians and gay men. The same thing is true of “transphobia”. The issue is not one of fear but rather one of discrimination.

Things are different with “Islamophobia”. It is also a misleading term but for a different reason. It is quite reasonable and not phobic at all for anyone to be at least a little worried about a religion with millions of its followers believing and much of its clergy teaching that it is not only acceptable but desirable to kill non-believers. A non-believer living in a Muslim domain would have reason to be more than a little fearful. Such sensible concerns do not justify Islamophobia as the term is used vulgarly – discrimination against Muslims for being Muslims. There are plenty of Muslims who have no interest in murdering non-believers and a good number who are liberally minded. Individuals deserve to be judged as individuals, whether they are embracing liberal values or revealing themselves to be savages by cheerleading for Hamas savages.

Defining Heroism Down

A few days ago a policeman and a fireman in our town were killed in a car wreck on the side of a slick highway while working on another accident.  A third man was injured. On the basis of what is known, the men were two professionals doing a tough job under dangerous conditions when things went terribly wrong due to no fault of theirs. That is enough to earn people’s respect and sympathy. No drum beating or hyperbole would have been necessary, but we got plenty  anyway.   

 Local officials and people in the local media have tried vulgarly to turn the accident and its aftermath into something resembling   the three days between John Kennedy’s assassination and his funeral  in Washington.  It has not only been excessive. It also probably intentionally gave the impression that police and firemen are members of an elevated class of beings, and that something happening to one of them is far worse and more serious than harm to an ordinary human being. (A couple of young kids were killed this week in a wreck on the same highway, and pretty much nobody in town noticed or cared.)  This was not unusual. It goes on all over.  It is part of a general tendency to over-romanticize “first responders”.

Of course the men were called heroes.  Many people these days call all cops and firemen heroes ( and sometimes  throw in school teachers to boot).  In fact a hero is someone who does a great thing requiring exceptional  courage and effort.   Charles Lindbergh in 1927  was a hero, regardless of what he did later.  Audie Murphy was a hero. Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins were heroes. The use of language matters.  Heroism  is an important thing worth honoring, and the  appellation of hero should not be used carelessly or promiscuously as happens these days. Otherwise the meaning and distinction can be lost.

Their Business

A person does not have to be a pedant to finds reason to notice some of the lousy ways English is being used in public discourse these days. All he has to do is watch TV or read articles at web sites – including those of large media companies. There is a  lot of bad, awkward, ungrammatical, and sometimes hard to understand stuff coming from people with jobs and  titles that would make a person think they should know better.

One of the worst and most common examples  is  the use of  “their” as singular when the sex  is not specified as  in “an employee is expected to wash their hands  before returning from the restroom”.  (Whose hands would that be, and would the employee have to wait until they showed up in the restroom before going back to work?) There is nothing wrong (though nothing imperative  either) in abandoning the old custom of usually using the masculine term when the sex is indeterminate or where the statement applies to people of both sexes.  There are some acceptable replacements for it.  One can use “he or she” and “his or her”.  One can follow the simple convention of male authors using “he” and “his”  and female authors using “she” and “her”.  One often can finesse things by making everything  plural as with “employees are expected to wash their hands before returning from the restroom”.  Such usages may be awkward at times, but they are better than "their" as singular.

Racism, Prejudice, and Discrimination

The term "racism" gets thrown around so carelessly these days that many people may have forgotten that it has a specific meaning. Racism is the doctrine that members of one racial or ethnic group are intrinsically superior or inferior to members of another or others.  Racists are people who hold such opinions. Example include Nazis, Ku Kluxers, and members of some so-called black or white supremacy groups.

Racial prejudice  is the belief in and practice of judging people’s individual character and qualities on the basis of their race or ethnicity.  Examples would include holding  such opinions  as “all black men in big cities are brutal thugs”, “all Mexicans are dirty and lazy”, or “all Germans are still closet Nazis” or holding those opinions with the “all” only implicit.  

Racial discrimination is the act of deciding how and under what conditions  one wants to  associate or not with another person at least partially on the basis of his race.

These three things are different, and it is worthwhile to keep them separate. While one may assume all racists would be prejudiced, not all prejudiced people are racists.   Similarly it is likely that a prejudiced person would want to practice discrimination, but people can discriminate for pragmatic or other reasons different from the broad conclusions of racial prejudice.

Racism is dangerous. There are very good reasons for taking actual racism of any sort seriously and opposing it vigorously. Individual acts of discrimination are usually a person’s private business and  deserve only disapproval if any notice at all.  It helps to know the difference, and to do that one must first understand that there is a difference.   

It is also useful to remember that things such as telling an ethnic joke, using a taboo word, or mentioning a statistical datum such as “a higher percentage of black men than white men commit violent crimes” or “east-Asian Americans have higher average IQ test scores than white Americans” may not be instances of any of the three, depending on context and intent.

Quixotic Gripes

Feeling a bit quixotic and perhaps wanting to offer a small homage to George Orwell, I note a few well established examples  of the corruption of language by  the marching enforcers of political correctness. 

The  term “challenged” makes utterly no sense as a euphemism for “handicapped”. A challenge is a provocative invitation to compete or strive. A blind or crippled person may well face challenges as he tries to cope with his handicap, but blindness and lameness are not themselves challenges. They are conditions. As an aside it is interesting how the use of the term “challenged” illustrates the futility of the whole enterprise of creating euphemisms. “Mentally retarded” was once a polite term for “feeble minded” or “dim witted”.  Once it  fell into too frequent use as a pejorative  for prissy sensibilities, we got “mentally challenged” which is itself now showing up in enough insults and jokes to cry out for its replacement. (“Retarded”, by the way, was better linguistically than “challenged”. It at least described the condition reasonably accurately.)  Similarly, “handicapped” and “disabled”, at first euphemisms for “crippled”, were replaced by their variant of “challenged”, and it too is now wanting a substitute euphemism. (The possible substitute “differentially-abled”  never got off  the ground, perhaps because its absurdity was obvious even to the irony and non-tin-ear challenged.)

Then we have the racial and ethnic  terms “native American” and “African American”.  “Native American”, in particular, offers a nearly unbeatable combination of goofiness and arrogance. In every other context  a native of a country or region is someone who was born there. So in usual usage, I am a native American as are upwards of three hundred million other native born citizens of this country. “American Indian” is a perfectly polite term that has the advantages of being both descriptive and devoid of loaded and inappropriate connotations. “African American”, on the other hand,  suffers mainly from being simply inaccurate. The term is used to refer not to a person’s continent of origin but to his membership  to some noticeable degree in a particular racial group, i.e. to a black American. It does not refer to a Boer, an Egyptian, or a Berber who becomes an American citizen, though each of these is an African American in the sense that Americans  tracing their ancestors to other places are called Italian Americans, German Americans, or Chinese Americans, for example. On the other hand, a black person living outside the United States and holding citizenship in another country is not an African American in any sensible usage, though there have been reported cases of politically correct newspapers calling citizens of various African or Caribbean nations “African Americans” to avoid using the  term “black”.  This is odd, since “black” was fairly recently quite politically correct and is descriptive, non-offensive, and, best of all, accurate in terms of what is meant.

All in all it is silly business, and the silliness can become particularly apparent when the politically correct dogs start chasing their own tails and catching  them. “Colored person” was a term used in polite conversation fifty to a hundred years ago to denote a black person. It was later deemed horridly inappropriate by people who more or less simultaneously decreed that “person of color” was just a splendid term to use.   Similarly there are those out there who claim to see vast differences between “disabled person” (bad) and “person with a disability” (supposed to be good). However the fact that most of this makes no sense does not mean it is completely unimportant. One should remember that in schools, governments, universities, and the traditional media there are large numbers of earnest fools and resentful scoundrels who equate the use or avoidance of the correct neologism of the day with virtue or vice and sometimes act on their judgments.