Word Magic
October 30, 2019
FROM Heather Mac Donald, writing about the manufactured racial hysteria in Madison, Wisconsin:
Contemporary racial practice … treats certain words as magical talismans, capable of inflicting harm on official victim groups regardless of how those words are used or even of their meaning, as protests over the academic term “master” reveal. This magical view of language has been lethal to many a career, in K-12 schools as well as in colleges and universities.
It is a safe bet that the only appearance of such racial epithets in mainstream white society today is as a mention, not a use. To generate a sufficient number of racist incidents to ground the anti-racism religion therefore requires suspending the use-mention distinction. But if reinstating that distinction will itself generate a racial crisis, then it will be resurrected in the blink of an eye. And that is what happened in Madison over the last two weeks.
