Book contents
- Words Matter
- Words Matter
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Getting Started
- 1 Labeling: “What Are You, Anyway?”
- 2 Marking/Erasing: “Instead of Saying ‘Normal Americans,’ You Can Just Say ‘Americans’”
- 3 Generalizing: “All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave”
- 4 Addressing: “All Right, My Man … Keep Your Hands on the Steering Wheel”
- 5 Putting Down: “[They] Aren’t People – They’re Animals”
- 6 Reforming/Resisting: “It’s Like a Kind of Sexual Racism”
- 7 Authorizing: “When I Use a Word It Means Just What I Choose It to Mean … [But Who] Is to Be Master?”
- 8 Concluding
- References
- Index
1 - Labeling: “What Are You, Anyway?”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 August 2020
- Words Matter
- Words Matter
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Getting Started
- 1 Labeling: “What Are You, Anyway?”
- 2 Marking/Erasing: “Instead of Saying ‘Normal Americans,’ You Can Just Say ‘Americans’”
- 3 Generalizing: “All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave”
- 4 Addressing: “All Right, My Man … Keep Your Hands on the Steering Wheel”
- 5 Putting Down: “[They] Aren’t People – They’re Animals”
- 6 Reforming/Resisting: “It’s Like a Kind of Sexual Racism”
- 7 Authorizing: “When I Use a Word It Means Just What I Choose It to Mean … [But Who] Is to Be Master?”
- 8 Concluding
- References
- Index
Summary
Labels – names – are at the heart of social identities. Identity categories like race, ethnicity, nationality, and even gender do not have sharp boundaries given by biology or history or cultural affiliations. Social identity groups are less like biological species than like sports teams or their fans, largely created and sustained by labeling and other linguistic and social processes. They are not unreal, but they are always changing. Identities can be created by labeling from above that obliterates the identity distinctions drawn by those labeled (e.g., Indians in the Americas) and helps disempower them. Identities can be created by strategic labeling to create alliances to help improve the positions of those so labeled (.e.g., Asian Americans). Labeling with a noun (e.g., a vegan or vegans) suggests that those labeled are a kind, sharing not just the properties that prompted attaching a label but a cluster of other relatively stable properties as well. In contrast, describing by using some kind of verb phrase (eats only plant-based food) carries fewer suggestions about persistence of that property or about other properties that those to whom the description applies might have.
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- Words MatterMeaning and Power, pp. 8 - 49Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020
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