At lunch yesterday, a friend of long standing mentioned that the conglomerate that now publishes his American politics textbook has hired a new employee, a vice-president for diversity and inclusion. It's a well-intended decision, I am sure, but it carries a potential downside. The new v-p has instructed my friend to make some changes to his prose. For example, he will no longer be allowed to report that Lyndon Johnson got his way by "arm-twisting" recalcitrant legislators. The metaphor, though commonly used back in the LBJ era, and still picturesque, is disrespectful to people who suffer from broken or withered arms and is especially discourteous to those who are missing one or both upper limbs. No more arm-twisting, therefore. My friend was also told that it is no longer permissible to say that in the U. S., "the poor tend to vote at lower levels of participation than the general population." The new v-p insists that the phrase, "the poor" denigrates various people by reducing them to a mere category. "The poor" should therefore be updated and altered to "'people experiencing poverty."
In our peaceful and prosperous midWestern town, we've had a continuing and difficult debate about homelessness. Some while ago, our extremely correct local newspaper ceased to denominate those without regular domiciliary appointments as "the homeless" and began to call them "people experiencing homelessness."
Such a circumlocution, I believe, though well-intended, misses the mark. The word "homeless" has a poignancy and immediacy that the bloodless bureaucratic euphemism "people experiencing homelessness" lacks. Rather than making homelessness more palatable; it makes it more painful.
Let us thank all the gods in the pantheon that Emma Lazarus did not write, "Give me your people experiencing lassitude, give me your people experiencing poverty."
I wonder what the v-p for inclusion would say about Jesus, who famously advised that "when thou makest a dinner or a supper, invite not thy friends, nor thy brethren, neither thy kinsmen, nor thy rich neighbors; lest they also bid thee again, and a recompence be made thee. But when thou makest a feast, invite the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind." Such a forceful series of evocative nouns! But would "the maimed," "the lame," "the blind," overleap the diversity and inclusion barrier and enter a 21st century textbook? I think not.
Although Jesus may have had some good ideas, he was definitely not "woke."
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