Words about slavery that we should all stop using

boing
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It can sometimes(either for legitimate pedagogical purposes or for enhanced driving trollies, it must be admitted) be an effective way of shaking up an affectively comfortable point of view by forcing the subject to ask themselves “If I don’t agree with this unfamiliar term; why not? Is there in fact a distinction or is it purely a matter of convention?”.

Sometimes the answer is that the proposed novel term is in fact inadequate or inaccurate. In other cases you can’t draw a serious distinction. Either way, though, it’s a handy tool for cutting through the (typically largely invisible but strongly implied) connotations of a given term for something.

Of course, there is the risk of getting punched if you refer to the confederates as ‘insurgents’ or ‘illegal enemy combatants’ in the wrong company…

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One of the ideas of rationalism is to make arguments in a dispassionate way, deliberately exposing the gears of one’s argument and giving the reader the handles with which to pull it apart if they can manage it. That shows confidence in one’s conclusions but also confidence in the process of debate even if one’s current thinking turns out to be flawed.

Trying to use terms that don’t take the point of view of any side in a conflict one is discussing (yet also allow discussing their points of view) helps with this kind of dispassion. Landis suggests avoiding terms that support (or even mention) the Confederate view, but doesn’t suggest avoiding terms that support the Union or United States view.

Using terms that have become standard across a field helps with the exposing-the-gears and giving-handles goals: it lets the reader compare more directly to other work in the field. It forces you to state your point of view explicitly rather than leaving it implicit in the choice of terms.

Landis’s proposal would help make it even more clear that one is not siding with the Confederates (in the case where one is not siding with the Confederates), and even more clear that one doesn’t want to say anything that “undermines the legitimacy of the United States as a political entity” (in the case where one doesn’t want to do that).

Compared to the goals of dispassionate debate, his goals seem nervous and self-conscious. Why should a scholar be more concerned with the obviousness of his allegiances than the quality of his arguments?

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You seem to be forgetting that this was was about ending slavery to give slaves the right to self-determination.

In my opinion basic human rights are way way way more important then state sovereignty rights.

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Interestingly enough, countries and states that care the most about respecting state sovereignty seem to care the least about respecting human autonomy. “The way we treat our minorities is none of your business” has always seemed a bit hollow.

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Well that’s fair. I guess my point is that “labor camp” doesn’t do a great job conveying what goes on at a slave plantation, and differentiating it from other types of forced labor camps. “Camp” implies impermanence, for instance. Russians captured and sent to German Stalags might expect to survive and be repatriated, as they might expect to complete their time in their own government’s Gulags. Slaves on an American plantation could not.

I thought about this a lot last night and this morning. It’s fine with me if we change the language used to describe some of these things, but we should change it to something more appropriate. The authors’ arguments are falling flat because they chose less descriptive, more confusing language.

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Also, people in labor camps, such as gulags, were sent there as part of a sentence. Yes, many of the trials were completely unfair, but importantly, people sent there got a sentence – five years or whatever. Assuming they survived (granted not always true) they could return to society and the Soviet Union was filled with people who reached high positions who were former gulag inmates. That’s different from a slave plantation where the slaves were there permanently. Calling it a “labor camp” softens the horror, not increases it.

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See also the (failed) attempt to change the official name of Rhode Island from “State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations”.

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To me, “labor camp” is more of a disguise of of the truth than “plantation” is. "Labor camp’ mostly suggests “prison labor camp,” as in “chain gang.” My instantaneous reaction is that a migrant camp would come under that label too.

Call it a slave plantation.

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Would “forced labour camp” work better for you? It kind of does help to distinguish it from a kibbutz or something…

Is there a better word for “forced labour”? Well adding in the notion of buying and selling humans like chattels, a culture of rape and violence, and the abduction and transportation of huge numbers of people we could come up with terms like “slave labour camp” and “slave economy”, “slave owning union” and “slaver union”.

A plantation is a place where they plant stuff (or in Irish parlance a practice of ethnically cleansing land of its original owners and “planting” farmers from outside on the stolen land - which I guess also applies to the “plantations” in the South in the USA.

I think, from the outside, it’s quite interesting how the US civil war seems to be quite a change from the truism “history gets written by the winners”. The historical perspective on your civil war seems to be quite literally framed by those we thought had lost. It certainly doesn’t seem to be seen from the light of, for example, freed slaves and their offspring.

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[quote=“From the article”]

“Why should we continue to employ wording that is biased, false, or laden with myth? Compromise, plantation, slave-owners, Union v. Confederacy, etc.: these phrases and many others obscure rather than illuminate; they serve the interests of traditionalists or white supremacists; they do not accurately reflect our current understanding of phenomena, thus they should be abandoned and replaced. I call upon historians in all fields to reexamine their language and terminology. Let us be careful and deliberate with our wording; though we study the past, let us not be chained to it.” - See more at: These Are Words Scholars Should No Longer Use to Describe Slavery and the Civil War | History News Network

If we’re using these words in a strictly historical context these phrases reveal as much about that history as do the accounts of it from which they are drawn.

Excepting that the author may understand that changing these words now to describe what they then described, that an additional lesson must be had in any historical instruction of the period, changing them serves to obscure the presence of those biases, falsehoods & myths which were prevalent then and continue to affect perceptions of the times.

Does any serious student of history take language as a reflection of the actual of it’s time or as the perceptions of one in those times? No person intent on shedding light on slavery or any aspect of history in North America is confused about what a plantation was during those times. A plantation was a privately owned estate where crops or orchards were cultivated by resident labour. In large potions of the US that labour was slave-labour. The word obscures nothing to the observant, and reveals that the owners, operators, beneficiaries of that plantation and it’s labour were complicit, accepting and often approving of the horrible practice of human enslavement. At the same time, words like labor camp existed at that time, but were not employed to describe these places. This is telling, and should be part of the lesson. That is leaving alone that labour camp has a specific meaning in the United States that does not currently include slave-labour camp.

Furthermore, Landis calls for this language to be abandoned and replaced. Therefore he is not of the mind of my Exception that should the replacement occur then the lesson of that language be addendum to any and all study of the era. That smacks of simple revisionism whether it applies to another revisionism or not.

In his article he uses the example of another scholar calling for a change to a series of acts collectively described then and now as the Compromise of 1850. He uses this to support his call for the abandonment and replacement of the historical terminology he objects to. Did Finkleman ever call for replacement of language, or was his work a revealing dissection that exposes the use of the word Compromise as itself a compromise in describing an appeasement? Finkleman wrote & edited a great deal on this period & my knowledge of his work is not exhaustive, but nowhere of what I have seen does he call for the replacement & abandonment of historical terminology in relation to those acts of Congress. He interprets them and that is his intent. Change them? Someone should ask him.

I could go on with every example, but I don’t need to. It is apparent to me & I think many that changing history through revisionism of language, language being a direct reflection of culture, is intellectually unappealing. It would do little or nothing to prevent traditionalists? (there are no traditionalists now breathing that desire a return to slavery because the tradition is abolished outside the span of all now alive) or white supremists from romanticizing the notions of slavery, but it would diminish historical understanding of that era were the terms used then, and used only contextually now, abolished, abandoned, written-out, replaced, sanitized or otherwise changed from the record.

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That would be accurate and clear, and perhaps clarity isn’t really the goal here.

I think it’s safe to say that Twain would be just as appalled by this euphemism as I am, and would tire of it as quickly as I have. Back in the bad old days my mother’s father used to beat his children just as hard for saying “oh sugar” as for saying “oh shit” - he claimed it’s what you meant and the feeling you put behind your expression that matters, not the actual word you used. If you’re going to talk about a word, use it. If you’re going to talk about a person, be aware of what words you use.

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The employment of Forced Labour in the United States is a legally protected practice in federal & state penitentiary systems. It is distinct from slavery or slave labour, which is prohibited.

So yes, there is the danger of conflation and confusion.

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This is a good compromise because it preserves the historical usage while distinguishing it from other plantations of any time which did/do not employ slave labour. Much better than Landis’s suggestion of abandonment & replacement.

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Seems like the points Baptist/Landis are trying to make are:

  • Plantations were not idyllic and pastoral, they were similar to a labor camp in conditions and operation.
  • Slave-owners do not have the right to own humans, and were responsible for those humans being slaves in the first place
  • The Confederacy was a rebellion against the US which was defeated, and it shouldn’t be given so much legitimacy.

These are fair points, and I agree with them. But they would be much better articulated directly, rather than using the discourse of language-changing.

I guess the idea of bringing in the language stuff is that it offers an action that the audience can take: “If you agree that plantations were not idyllic and pastoral, then signal that by calling them labor camps instead.” That kind of language hacking has been an interesting and useful strategy in some cases, but it’s often not the best. I think academics are kind of limited in the kinds of action they can conceive, so we end up with these kind of weird calls to action that actually originated from very solid points.

Anyway, MY point is that we can take seriously the points Baptist/Landis were getting at without wholeheartedly embracing what was probably only a semi-serious language proposal to begin with.

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The Nazis had their own set of euphemisms.
Some of them are only now being slowly rooted out of the German language. Others are well-known enough that they have lost all white-washing power and have actually become quite powerful terms in their own right. I do not remember hearing anyone using the Nazi euphemism “Gleichschaltung” to refer to anything but totalitarian control over society.

Some euphemisms are worth keeping as monuments to past crimes.

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I can get behind the actual title of the article… The title Cory used not so much. Really don’t want to refer to the style of blinds on my windows as “labour camp blinds”. If we want to talk about civil war plantations and call them labour camps fine.

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I’m pretty sure that slave owner has a discrete meaning, but it does not necessarily have a negative connotation. The more racist you are, the more inclined you are to believe that being a slave owner is not necessarily a bad thing. Refering to slave owners as enslavers seems to me is accurate and damning in context. In a way slave owner isn’t any more.

You’ve understood this perfectly yet:

I don’t see any evidence of this, this might be something you’re bringing with you. It seems to me that adding condemnation is very much the thing to want to do. The goal itself.
All words have meaning and in context add an emotional context. This is the nature of language. Slave owner already has a precise meaning yet you feel that calling them enslavers adds condemnation. Yet I don’t, I feel that slave owner already is condemnation, in this sense changing the language used aims to make communication more precise.

The words we use today aren’t a platonic ideal themselves, they do not reflect reality as it is. They are subjective reality already.

This is not that, not necessarily, this seems to me more in line with making persuasive arguments in a context where some words have lost their emotional appeal.

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It’s a strange thing about the article…

There is one part of the phraseology of the civil war that it doesn’t propose to change. And that’s the part that was actually contentious during the conflict itself. The name of the war.

Calling it the “Civil war” is itself a compromise position, because at the time, it was “The Rebellion”.

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Are you a historian? You seen to have a mistaken notion of what historians do… it’s not all agree. It’s debate issues just like this. And there is a huge rejection of what you deem to be the “evolution” of history. It’s that notion which actually creates cognitive dissonance. Historiography moves with the times, to be sure, but most historians reject teleological thinking.

Except that language from the past is often not acceptable. However, for historically accuracy, you don’t want to censor documents from the past. If we’re supposed to use consistent language, how precisely do we quote documents that uses language that would now be inappropriate. We no longer use negro or colored in talking about African Americans - we use that or black. Am I supposed to not use those when analyzing documents? Do I say negro in my own language when talking about a document? History is not a reproduction of the past, it’s an interpretation of the past. Hence, our modes of analysis and language changes.

Why can’t pop history be real history?

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