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Hot 2015 Words? A Political ‘ism’ Vision

Hot 2015 Words? A Political ‘ism’ Vision

What’s the word? The “Word of the Year” at Oxford Dictionaries is not even a word. It is an emoji, a digital image that is used in text messages to express an idea or emotion in a style that seems in my eyes to be aimed illiterates.

Oxford Dictionaries justified this selection by citing an explosion in “emoji culture” over the last year and not, as I fear, a collapse in the public’s desire to read.

“It’s flexible, immediate and infuses tone beautifully,” said Casper Grathwohl, president of Oxford Dictionaries in a statement. “As a result emoji are becoming an increasingly rich form of communication, one that transcends linguistic borders.”

Indeed, I’m sure that’s true, provided that you can figure out what the darn emoji means. The emoji that Oxford Dictionaries happened to choose is hardly a model of simplicity or clarity.

Titled “face with tears of joy,” it depicts a gleefully cheerful smiley face with enormous water drops exploding out of its eyes. Cute, but it’s nowhere near the “rich form of communication” displayed by what has become known as the “poop emoji” in polite company. It depicts a steaming brown coil of the stuff with enough clarity to require no further translation.

But as an indicator of the social, political and economic world in which I usually work, a world that feels a lot less predictable than it did a year ago, I prefer the choices made by two other major dictionary companies.

First prize in my view goes to “identity,” the choice of Dictionary.com, a timely topic for the year that gave us Rachel Dolezal and Caitlin Jenner, among other challenges to our society’s conventional sense of selfhood and otherness.

Dolezal will be remembered as the Spokane, Washington, NAACP leader who passed for black, a complete reversal of the usual American tradition. This upset white conservatives who didn’t like the NAACP anyway. It also upset black traditionalists who felt Dolezal hadn’t paid enough dues to pose as an authentic African-American.

This conundrum proved to be remarkably similar to the dustup kicked up by Caitlin Jenner’s decision to emerge from the body of Olympic medalist Bruce Jenner. A few prominent radical feminists resented what they saw as Jenner’s EZ-pass around decades of struggle against institutional sexism.

Episodes like that, Dictionary.com CEO Liz McMillan said in a news release, sent enough people running to online dictionaries and other media to make identity “the clear frontrunner.”

“Our data indicated a growing interest in words related to identity,” McMillan said in the release, “as people encountered new terms throughout the year based on events tied to gender, sexuality, race, and other key issues.”

In a similar vein, Merriam-Webster.com named a suffix to be their Word of the Year: “-ism.” The website’s word watchers began to notice a surge in lookups that ended in those three letters. Of the thousands of queries seven with noticeably political themes rose to the top: socialism, fascism, racism, feminism, communism, capitalism and terrorism.

This was a year in which Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Democratic presidential candidate and self-described democratic socialist, opened up a national dialogue of how socialism really works as something more than the epithet that conservatives like to fling at President Barack Obama. As Sanders’ crowds surged in mid-summer, so did lookups for “socialism” online.

Similarly billionaire showman Donald Trump’s calls for mass deportation of immigrants and praise for Vladimir Putin, among other comments, sent many rushing to their keyboards to look up “fascism.”

And racism, feminism, communism, capitalism and terrorism — among other popular “isms” — have been so bent out of shape by partisan and ideological accusations and counter-accusations that you need a dictionary just to keep score.

It is too early to say how much of an impact all of this chatter about identity and “-isms” will have on the 2016 presidential campaigns. We have elections to decide questions like that.

But as money, ideology and celebrity increasingly replace political parties as the pilots of national election campaigns, I am encouraged to hear that at least some people care about the words our political leaders use. I wish more of our political leaders did.

(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.) (c) 2015 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Photo: “Socialim! At least fascists can spell.” (Sarah Joy via Flickr)

Black-Like-Her Case Is A How-To-Feel Issue

Black-Like-Her Case Is A How-To-Feel Issue

A white daughter is born to white parents. At some point, she identifies with being black. As a young woman, she changes her appearance, her skin, her hair and she begins referring to herself as mixed race. She is later assumed to be African-American. She ultimately rises to the head of an NAACP chapter in Spokane, Washington, until her past is revealed and, at 37, she resigns amid scandal.

When I first heard this story — the strange tale of Rachel Dolezal — it raised my eyebrows. Many folks are born into one religion, yet convert to another, or are born in one country but become citizens of another, or learn in one language but speak in another. The finished human product may not always resemble what the birth certificate predicted.

Still, there used to be certain things you were just, well, stuck with. Skin color was one of them.

Today, it seems, what you feel trumps what science says you are. In fact, with the aid of a flexible English language, certain words have become a virtual science by themselves.

If you call yourself something, it can be so.

Rachel Dolezal went from calling herself white to, at least at one point recently, calling herself black. Despite protests from her Caucasian parents, who seem bewildered by her gene denial, she continues to tell a crooked story. When she was younger, she sued a university for allegedly discriminating against her because she was white (so it served her purpose then) but this past week, on NBC, she said, “Well, I definitely am not white. Nothing about being white describes who I am.”

Except for her born skin color, which is the only thing that counts in defining her race. Dolezal sees “being white” as an experience, or an attitude, or a way of acting, which she rejects. (This, by the way, is as insulting to white people as when bigots suggest there is a “black” way of acting.)

But while rejecting biological details because you don’t feel that way, or don’t want to think of yourself that way, may be satisfying to the individual, it does create issues for society.

Let’s start with the simple ones.

A Fox News commentator, Andrea Tantaros, in response to the stories of Dolezal and Caitlyn Jenner, asked, “If I self-identify as a cat, a feline, do I have to pay income taxes?” It’s a comical suggestion, but not so funny in these changing (or is it changeling?) times.

For example, what would the rules be if a military draft were reinstated — and only young men were sent into combat? Would a biological man identifying as a woman be exempt? If so, might not many men falsely claim this?

If scholarships are offered for African-American students, would the next Rachel Dolezal qualify because she identifies as one? And how do you keep a census? How do you study trends? How to do track medical data of certain ethnic groups?

These are real and often serious questions.

Add to this the case of people who want to identify one way today and another way tomorrow. Sound crazy? Why? If biological definitions are merely “assigned” to you at birth, you can accept or reject them whenever you choose.

Dolezal interviews in a calm and steady voice, as if to say, “What’s the fuss about?” This despite fibbing about being born in a teepee or living in South Africa. Critics have labeled her everything from a nutcase to a pathological liar.

I wonder whether it’s not something else. I wonder whether it’s not our me-first culture which teaches that how we feel is all that matters. It’s woven into the sky-high divorce rate, the explosion of antidepressant drugs, the celebration of ego without much accomplishment.

And now it’s entangled in genetics. If we feel something deeply enough, that can make it so — even being a different race. Dolezal told NBC she cried when she read about Caitlyn Jenner, saying, “I resonated with some of the themes of isolation, of being misunderstood.”

I’m no scientist, but aren’t those feelings?

The shame of it is, by most accounts, Dolezal was doing a good job at the Spokane NAACP before stepping down. Why couldn’t she have done so as a white woman? It’s nonsense to think that your skin has to be the same color as someone else’s to help them.

Maybe that’s the only positive takeaway in this bizarre story. You don’t need to be black to care about black causes, or white to care about white. Most of those causes are, at their core, about being human. If we accepted how much we all fit in that category, there might not be such a rush to deny the others.

Screenshot via KXLY.

Dolezal’s Deceit Demonstrates A Valuable Truth

Dolezal’s Deceit Demonstrates A Valuable Truth

The curious case of Rachel Dolezal has sparked furious commentary about her deceit, her arrogance, her narcissism. But I see something more in her strange tale: a reminder that race is but a social construct. As geneticists told us years ago, there really isn’t any such thing as race.

Human beings are 99.9 percent genetically identical, Craig Venter and Francis Collins, who led research on the human genome, announced in 2000. As Duana Fullwiley, a medical anthropologist, has put it, “There is no genetic basis for race.”

Still, human beings are deeply invested in the concept. Our lizard brains are attuned to superficial differences — hair texture, skin color, language. Tens of thousands of years ago, Homo sapiens depended on their ability to distinguish friend from foe in a flash. If another creature standing upright and using opposable thumbs looked like me, he was a friend. If he didn’t, well, whack him with a stick.

And, unhappily, we’ve not evolved much beyond that basic instinct.

But primal identification of “the other” is no longer necessary for survival. In fact, in the 21st century, it impedes human progress.

Look no further than the massacre that took place on Wednesday evening at a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina. An assailant opened fire during prayer meeting — during prayer meeting — and killed nine people. Police have identified the suspect as a young white man, Dylann Storm Roof, who allegedly spewed racist stereotypes and championed white supremacy. They have labeled the atrocity a hate crime.

That’s one of the more horrific examples of the racism that is fueled by fear and hatred of the other, but it stands out only for its extremes. Every day, discrimination overwhelms routine encounters — between police and civilians, between teachers and pupils, between employers and job applicants.

And I’d be remiss if I suggested that bigotry is a habit practiced only by whites. While institutional racism is the province of the powerful — and, in the United States, the powerful are still mostly white — discrimination based on difference is a human tradition, passed on from one generation to the next, among black families, brown families, tan families, pink families. A Muslim woman in a hijab, a group of Latinas speaking Spanish, a black man in dreadlocks — all draw an instinctive inner scowl from some person who looks or sounds a bit different.

So Dolezal shook us up a bit. We couldn’t tell by looking. If she could be so authentically “black” as to fool her constituents at the Spokane chapter of the NAACP despite the fact that she was born “white,” doesn’t that tell us something about the superficiality of these differences?

Now, I’m not excusing the lady’s lies. You can hardly champion social justice while standing on a foundation of fraud. There is no excuse for her mendacity, no matter how noble she believed her motives to be.

But her story ought to remind us just how flimsy this business of race really is. Even “black culture” and “white culture” are permeable concepts, easily penetrated.

When I was younger, stereotypes that attempted to limit black accomplishments were common. The list of our supposed shortcomings was long — and absurd. Black people couldn’t be distance runners (did anyone tell the Kenyans?), couldn’t play tennis (you’ve heard of Serena Williams), or play golf (well, Tiger Woods used to). And certainly we weren’t smart enough to be astrophysicists, Neil deGrasse Tyson.

And while black Americans didn’t have the cultural cachet to invent a long list of limits for whites, we responded with a few stereotypes of our own. As just one example, we believed that white teens couldn’t dance. They didn’t have rhythm. That myth, too, has been exploded by any number of young white rockers — and multiple contestants on those competitive talent shows.

Humankind is not yet ready to acknowledge what science stands ready to teach us: Race does not exist. We seem to have a primal need to divide, to separate, to exclude. Categories provide us some strange comfort.

But the race-tinged sagas playing out on the evening news ought to force us to think about the ways in which those categories limit us all.

(Cynthia Tucker won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2007. She can be reached at cynthia@cynthiatucker.com.)

Rachel Dolezal Proves Race Not A Fixed Or Objective Fact

Rachel Dolezal Proves Race Not A Fixed Or Objective Fact

Of the 60 people who co-founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909, only seven were, in fact, “colored.” Most of the organization’s founders were white liberals like Mary White Ovington. Its highest honor, the Spingarn Medal, is named for Joel Spingarn, who was Jewish and white.

Point being, white people have been intricately involved in the NAACP struggle for racial justice from day one. So Rachel Dolezal did not need to be black to be president of the organization’s Spokane chapter. That she chose to present herself as such anyway, adopting a frizzy “natural” hairstyle and apparently somehow darkening her skin, has put her at the bullseye of the most irresistible watercooler story of the year. This will be on Blackish next season; just wait and see.

As you doubtless know, the 37-year-old Dolezal was outed last week by her estranged parents. In response, they say, to a reporter’s inquiry, they told the world her heritage includes Czech, Swedish, and German roots, but not a scintilla of black. In the resulting mushroom cloud of controversy, Dolezal was forced to resign her leadership of the Spokane office. Interviewed Tuesday by Matt Lauer on Today, she made an awkward attempt to explain and/or justify herself. “I identify as black,” she said, like she thinks she’s the Caitlyn Jenner of race. It was painful to watch.

Given that Dolezal sued historically black Howard University in 2002 for allegedly discriminating against her because she is white, it’s hard not to see a certain opportunism in her masquerade. Most people who, ahem, “identify as black” don’t have the option of trying on another identity when it’s convenient.

That said, it’s hard to be too exercised over this. Dolezal doesn’t appear to have done any harm, save to her own dignity and reputation. One suspects there are deep emotional issues at play, meaning the kindest thing we can do is give her space and time to work them out.

Besides, this story’s most pointed moral has less to do with Dolezal and her delusions than with us and ours. Meaning America’s founding myth, the one that tells us race is a fixed and objective fact.

It isn’t. Indeed, in 2000, after mapping the genetic codes of five people — African-American, Caucasian, Asian, and Hispanic — researchers announced they could find no difference among them. “The concept of race,” one of them said, “has no scientific basis.” The point isn’t that race is not real; the jobless rate, the mass incarceration phenomenon, and the ghosts of murdered boys from Emmett Till to Tamir Rice argue too persuasively otherwise.

Rather, it’s that it’s not real in the way we conceive it in America where, as historian Matt Wray once put it, the average 19-year-old regards it as a “set of facts about who people are, which is somehow tied to blood and biology and ancestry.” In recent years, Wray and scholars like David Roediger and Nell Irvin Painter have done path-breaking work exploding that view. To read their research is to understand that what we call race is actually a set of cultural likenesses, shared experiences and implicit assumptions, i.e., that white men can’t jump and black ones can’t conjugate.

To try to make it more than that, to posit it as an immutable truth, is to discover that, for all its awesome power to determine quality of life or lack thereof, race is a chimera. There is no there, there. The closer you look, the faster it disappears.

Consider: If race were really what Wray’s average 19-year-old thinks it is, there could never have been a Rachel Dolezal; her lie would have been too immediately transparent. So ultimately, her story is the punchline to a joke most of us don’t yet have ears to hear. After all, this white lady didn’t just try to pass herself off as black.

She got away with it.

(Leonard Pitts is a columnist for The Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, FL, 33132. Readers may contact him via email at lpitts@miamiherald.com.)