Like any prescribed usage, equity language has a willed, unnatural quality. The guides use scientific-sounding concepts to lend an impression of objectivity to subjective judgments: structural racialization, diversity value proposition, arbitrary status hierarchies. The concepts themselves create status hierarchies—they assert intellectual and moral authority by piling abstract nouns into unfamiliar shapes that immediately let you know you have work to do. Though the guides recommend the use of words that are available to everyone (one suggests a sixth-to-eighth-grade reading level), their glossaries read like technical manuals, put together by highly specialized teams of insiders, whose purpose is to warn off the uninitiated. This language confers the power to establish orthodoxy.
Mastering equity language is a discipline that requires effort and reflection, like learning a sacred foreign tongue—ancient Hebrew or Sanskrit. The Sierra Club urges its staff “to take the space and time you need to implement these recommendations in your own work thoughtfully.” “Sometimes, you will get it wrong or forget and that’s OK,” the National Recreation and Park Association guide tells readers. “Take a moment, acknowledge it, and commit to doing better next time.”
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. The culture war in this country is really about who gets to impose its taboos--the priggish Right or the priggish Left. Most people in the middle couldn't care less about what obsesses either extreme, but when push comes to shove they will pick sides, and they will ally with whoever seems to resonate with what they "feel" is right. And because most people don't care one way or the other, they'll just go along with whatever the group they affiliate with requires of them.
If you work at a university or a non-profit, you'll simply adapt as required. You might make a mistake, but you know, "Take a moment, acknowledge it, and commit to doing better next time.” This seems so pleasant and reasonable. What decent person would resist compliance? But why does it feel so dystopic? Is it just that I'm an old guy who is too enmeshed with the patriarchy? Maybe there's some of that. But I'm not an idiot. I know the difference between what is truly offensive and what is b.s. I know what basic human decency requires, and this is not it.
I recently watched the Season 2, Episode 6 of Reservation Dogs entitled "Decolonativization". It captures perfectly the nonsense factor in all of this, which is that it's based in theory that has hardly any relationship to the way ordinary, decent people--in this case the "colonized"-- live and what they care about most deeply. Watch the episode; it's pitch perfect. It nimbly and gently demonstrates that this kind of top-down programming is just another form of colonization. It demonstrates how fundamentally unrelatable it is for people who have no aspiration to be educated liberal elites. And how the people who do buy into it have no idea why they have bought into it except that it's what you do if you have ambitions to make it in the world of Aspen Institute Neoliberalism.
As Packer suggests, its main function is shibboleth language. Speaking it is a pre-requisite for belonging in the elite strata of the university, media, non-profit, and many corporate worlds. It justifies itself by an ideology of compassion, but is there any real compassion in it, or is it for the most part a parody of compassion, a form of cheap compassion that doesn't cost anything except the effort to conform.
And yet, the problem is that there's a truth there--marginalized people have experienced real injury. Native Americans were colonized and defrauded and betrayed over and over again, and those are truths that every decent American needs to acknowledge, and it calls for a morally adequate response. It's just that this language policing just feels so fundamentally artificial and stupid. It fails to deal with the deep particularity of the human beings who have been affected by historical injustices.
It's a gesture, maybe, and it seems harmless enough, except that it is harmful as all parodies of truth are harmful. To adopt such language gives people the illusion that they are fighting for justice without dealing with the deeper structures that sustain more intractable, truly hurtful injustices. Anybody with an ounce of decency feels the injustice. And it's rather awkward because the same decency compels us to want to do something about it. But as with consoling someone who has lost a loved one, talking too much doesn't help, and it often makes things worse.