More changes are being offered to satisfy the “cancel culture”

January 3, 2023

Here we go again! Along with all the efforts to “cancel” things that upset someone, a few people, or lots of people — like the names of buildings, streets and schools; and statues of people, and actual people living and dead — there is a new movement. This one seeks to eliminate words and phrases used for years, decades or centuries.

In an act of “we gotta get woke,” Stanford University has published an index of "harmful language." The school plans to eliminate this language from its websites and computer code, and will offer replacement terms to be used in the future. And likely these rules will apply to those on campus and otherwise associated with the school.

Stanford calls this project the Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative, and it is described as a "multi-phase, multi-year project to address harmful language in IT at Stanford," according to the project guide.

The guide goes on to say that its goal is to eliminate "many forms of harmful language," including "racist, violent, and biased language, including disability bias, ethnic bias, ethnic slurs, gender bias, implicit bias, and sexual bias. "It also states that it wants to educate people on the impact of words.

It should be fairly obvious that the language Stanford finds “harmful” consists of words and phrases that have been around in popular usage for years or decades. But in this new hypersensitive world, they are no longer useful because of some relatively under-lying meaning that someone might find offensive.

Here’s one example. Under a section titled “Imprecise Language,” the guide advised readers to replace the term “American” with “U.S. citizen.” The reason for this is that calling people who live in the United States of America (USA) “Americans” insinuates that the USA is the most important country in the Americas.

There are four groups of countries in the Americas: North America, Central America, South America and The Caribbean. And in those four groups, there are more than 40 individual countries. However, only one of them, the United States of America, has the word “America” in its name. The USA has also been known as “America,” for a long time. Therefore, the citizens of the USA can properly be called “Americans.”

This example is plain evidence of how foolish this and many other such efforts are. Perhaps the powers that be at Stanford realized this, had it explained to them, or gave in to the outrage over this cancellation, because it has back-tracked on this word, and now claims to absolutely welcome the term “American.” 

Progress? Perhaps.

Some of the terms Stanford deems harmful and has not back-tracked on include "abort," which the school wants to replace with "cancel" or "end," due to moral concerns about abortion; "child prostitute" to be replaced with a "child who has been trafficked," so the person is not defined by just one characteristic; and "Karen" is to be replaced with "demanding or entitled White woman."

The index suggests using "accessible parking" instead of "handicap parking," "died by suicide" instead of "committed suicide" and "anonymous review" instead of "blind review." We also should use "unenlightened" as a replacement for "tone deaf," and a "person with a substance abuse disorder" as a replacement for "addict."

The institutionalized racism section says to avoid using phrases like "black hat," "black mark" and "black sheep" because of "negative connotations to the color black." It also says to avoid using "grandfathered" and use "legacy status" instead, because of "roots in the ‘grandfather clause’ adopted by Southern states to deny voting rights to Blacks."

“Immigrant” is out, and the preferred substitute is “person who has immigrated.” The Wall Street Journal noted about this cancellation that, “It’s the iron law of academic writing: Why use one word when four will do?”

“You can’t ‘master’ your subject at Stanford any longer,” the Journal added, saying “in case you hadn’t heard, the school instructs that ‘historically, masters enslaved people.’” 

Does Stanford still award “masters” degrees? Or, will they simply be renamed “post-bachelor,” “bachelor-plus,” or “pre-doctorate,” “not-yet-doctorate,” or something else?

Given that these words and phrases “trigger” the sensitivities of some folks, and that the multitude of other things that people want to cancel are things that have been around or in common use for a long time, and their meanings have been understood and accepted as useful and normal.

Why is it now suddenly necessary to get rid of them?

These days there is virtually nothing that doesn’t bother someone. So, the question that arises is, are we going to give in to this new mania and change everything when some people become uncomfortable with them? Or, are we just going to learn to deal with the discomforts, as we have been doing since humans have existed?

The things that are now considered as unacceptable are part of American society and history. They are “us.” If they are removed, we lose the valuable lessons they can teach us. If we reword things, we are giving in to what in many cases are hyper-sensitive feelings about things that we historically have simply accepted. 

We aren’t perfect, and will never be. We need to learn to live with these imperfections.