Words and Things

Writing is a process that involves a lot of learning…so much that what one wants to say can get sidetracked.

I picked the title of this post because I wanted to talk about the gap between things in the world and the words that are used to refer to them.  But there seemed a familiarity to that title, and a quick search showed that, in fact, there is a famous book titled Words and Things, by a philosopher named Ernest Gellner.  A brief perusal of Wikipedia suggests that my concern is not the same as Gellner’s but there is a relationship between them. But I don’t want to talk about Gellner’s ideas.

What I want to talk about is the gap between things in the world and the words that we use to describe them.  I have been thinking of this both with respect to a common issue that causes trouble for academics: the question of genres and how to write about genre issues, and also the question of race, which is getting a lot of attention in the U.S. press, for obvious reasons.

My main concern is that the words are not the things, and I think that dangerous effects come from assuming identity between the words and things.  This is especially a concern for the damage of over-generalization, especially the use of stereotypes.

Genre and race are social constructions: they’re lenses through which people can see the world, but close examination of the ideas will reveal that drawing the boundaries on categories like these is more a matter of choice than a matter of reality: the words get used  as people see fit, but those usages do not necessarily adhere to any objective standard that is beyond dispute. Yes, of course, if we look at individual examples (whether people or artifacts), we can easily see gross differences: yes, this man has dark skin and this man has light skin; this piece of writing has rhymes/verses, while that has prose narrative. And yes, these gross differences can be used to characterize large groups for whom those gross differences hold true.  Sometimes it can be very useful to hold on to such generalizations.

But sometimes those generalizations can become burdens.  I suppose that these burdens depend on the context, but in general, the issue at hand is what any term means is not objectively definable, nor is the meaning of any term the same for all people.

My concern for genre is prompted by a paper draft I was reading recently that spent a lot of effort on defining a genre and discussing the different theoretical concerns for the genre. The problem for the academic writer trying to use genre is that it is very easy to slip into genre debates, and little clear way to end genre debates.  The alternative for the academic writer is to avoid relying on genre terms (and other sweeping generalizations), and to focus on specific things: for example a specific work, or a specific characteristic of certain works. By focusing on the specific issues in the world—the things to be described, rather than the words chosen to describe them—there is no ground for debates that grow out of different ideas of what a word means.

This question of avoiding genre in academic debate is often a real danger to graduate students, in the sense that it can really delay development of good research, but this is a relatively insignificant concern compared to concerns about race.

My concern for race was sparked by a number of different articles I was reading recently, all of which made gross generalizations about race, despite the clear intention of the articles to reveal and disrupt the systemic patterns of racial discrimination present in the US. One article (https://www.thedailybeast.com/why-do-white-people-feel-discriminated-against-i-asked-them) quoted Tim Wise: “Whites have ALWAYS felt that we were being discriminated against every time there was evidence of black or brown progress.” With all due respect to Mr. Wise, I think he should speak for himself. He has no idea what all white people think. I feel absolutely safe to say that in any large group of people, there will be a variety of opinions and ideas. Personally, I don’t feel that black or brown progress means that I am being discriminated against, even if black or brown progress erode my white privilege. Personally, I feel that black and brown progress shows a move towards the kind of society that I would like to live in, one in which all people have real opportunities, and where success is more dependent on personal traits than on parentage.

In this society that is characterized by such great divisiveness, I think that generalizations about groups tend to expand the divisions in society. Assuming that someone thinks or feels a certain thing on the basis of some gross generalization (e.g., “white vs. black”), dehumanizes the individual.  If the hope is to eliminate racism or other divisive patterns of thought, then there is benefit in trying to avoid such gross generalizations: reducing people to nothing more than avatars of some category that you have constructed in your understanding of the world, reduces your chance of cooperating with actual people.  

Whether someone gets counted as white or black depends on context—and that means that categories like white and black can be fluid. In the movie The Commitments the protagonist says “Do you not get it, lads? The Irish are the blacks of Europe. And Dubliners are the blacks of Ireland. And the Northside Dubliners are the blacks of Dublin. So say it once, say it loud: I'm black and I'm proud.”  But Irish, in the context of the US in the 21^st century, are most definitely not black. 

Such things can be much more personal—one can imagine, for example, the Commitments character being “black” while in Dublin, and then traveling to the US and immediately becoming white.  Do we then assume that that person will feel the same way about discrimination against blacks that a white person born and raised in a Southern family with roots tracing back to the  Confederacy and further?

Using words to focus on one thing can also obscure focus on others: I recently read an article that argued that all white people are racist, because all white people have experienced the privileges of being white. (This does make the kind of over-generalization of which I was speaking—does a Dubliner experience “white privilege” if he or she lives in a context where he or she is at the bottom of the social order?)  In the case of this article, the word “racism” was used to describe a certain thing: the experience of white privilege.  But this use of the word “racism” obscures another use of the word racism—the meaning that “racism” is an attitude of racial superiority. And that attitude is a crucial one. Yes, whites all experience white privilege, but do all whites share racist attitudes?  Using “racism” to talk about people who have benefitted from white privilege obscures the fact the some white people think that black people are inferior, while other white people do not. A white child of 3 years of age had benefitted from white privilege, but I think it unlikely that a 3-year-old can have any meaningful sense of racial superiority. More personally, since I believe that race is a social construction, I don’t think it’s meaningful to speak of racial superiority because “race” isn’t inherent in people: how can one race be superior to another if races don’t exist?

My concern here is for the use of words and for the danger of using common simple words to describe complex things in the world. If we reduce a work of art to a genre—a “novel”, classical music, etc.—then we can miss important details. Reducing people to a concept—“black,” “white,” “racist,” “woke”—obscures the complexity of people and limits chances to work together.  Trying to focus on the thing in the world may require more words—it’s more complicated to say “people who have benefitted from structural inequalities that are often based on visual cues like the light color of their skin” than it is to say “whites”—but such careful definitions avoid making simplistic assumptions about people and their attitudes.