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Jan. 8, 2021 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
07:04
Call It What It Is
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Hello, I'm Jared Taylor with American Renaissance.
You know what euphemisms are.
Nice sounding names for things that may not be so nice.
And euphemisms are everywhere.
The idea seems to be that you can make something better just by changing its name.
We used to have classes for slow learners.
Now we have special ed.
No one is crippled, deaf, or blind anymore.
They're physically challenged, hearing impaired, or visually impaired.
My deaf father always used to say that calling him"hearing impaired" didn't help his hearing one bit.
Once upon a time we had insane asylums.
Now we have mental institutions.
There were places with names like Matawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.
Now I guess no one is criminally insane.
Prisons are correctional facilities.
Slums are inner cities.
Sounds kind of cozy, actually.
You don't have an abortion anymore.
You terminate a pregnancy.
Addicts are people with a history of substance abuse.
Garbage men are sanitation engineers.
When Fido lifts his leg, there actually are people who say Fido went to the bathroom.
That's just as ridiculous as the Los Angeles Times banning the words birth defect, stepchild, and crazy because they might give offense.
The San Francisco Board of Supervisors officially banned the words felon.
Convict and juvenile delinquent.
Ex-cons are now justice-involved persons or returning residents.
I like that.
Get out of the slammer and you're a returning resident.
If you're on probation, you're a person under supervision.
Many euphemisms were cooked up to excuse people from responsibility.
America used to have bums and winos.
Now they're the homeless, as if they're neat little suburban houses.
had just blown down in a hurricane.
Nobody is shiftless or feckless or a loafer anymore.
They are the downtrodden or in marginalized communities, which means that someone else did it to them.
Illegal alien, which is an accurate legal term, has been banned from liberal media and replaced with undocumented, as if they left their birth certificates at home.
Comprehensive immigration reform sounds promising.
Except that it means amnesty for illegals.
People who hop the border are migrants, as if they were just like geese flying overhead.
Professor Steven Pinker of Harvard explains the reason for euphemisms.
People invent new, polite words to refer to emotionally laden or distasteful things, but the euphemism becomes tainted by association, and the new one that must then be found acquires its own negative connotations.
Well, I can't think of a better example of this than all the different names black people have insisted we call them.
For a long time, blacks were happy to be called colored.
NAACP stands for National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which was founded in 1909.
But colored lost its magic, and Negro became the respectable word.
No one capitalized it.
It was just like white.
But the colored people at the NAACP started a huge campaign demanding uppercase.
And in the May 1930 issue of its magazine, The Crisis, the NAACP proclaimed victory.
The New York Times had announced, in our style book, Negro is now added to the list of words to be capitalized.
There was much rejoicing.
But even with a capital N, the charm of being a Negro began to fade.
In the 1960s and 70s, there was a brief vogue for Afro-American, and then blacks decided they wanted to be black.
That put them squarely on an equal footing with white people.
Then they apparently decided being equal wasn't good enough.
In the late 1980s, Jesse Jackson announced yet another new name, African American.
That meant older people had to live through the entire sequence.
They had to stop saying colored people because that was declared offensive.
Then they had to purge negro from their vocabularies because that was no good.
And then they had to learn a seven-syllable jawbreaker if they wanted to be absolutely certain they weren't being racist.
Well, fortunately, you can still say black, but African-American is best if you're feeling obsequious.
But white people still have to deal with certain mysteries.
Why is it okay for blacks to use the N-word, but it's a firing offense for us?
And why is colored people off limits, but people of color is stylish?
Please note that white people just keep on being white people, century after century.
The word never seems to get bad associations because it's associated, well, with white people.
We haven't come to the end of this name game.
In 2014, a black woman named Lori Tharps wrote an op-ed for the New York Times insisting that black should be spelled with a capital B. She didn't say anything about capitalizing white.
Well, five years later, the Times still uses lowercase.
My guess it's because if it capitalized black, it would have to capitalize white, and that would stick in its craw.
In the meantime, Have you noticed that it's now the vogue to talk about enslaved persons rather than slaves?
If you go to Jefferson's home, Monticello, all you hear about are people enslaved or enslaved persons.
The theory is that the word slave implies it's someone's nature or essence, but enslaved person makes slavery sound imposed, external, unnatural.
Using the right words proves you are sensitive.
Carpenter or accountant sound like someone's essence, implying he has no claim to all the infinite wonder and variety of personhood?
Shouldn't we say a carpentering person or a person who counts?
Well, that would be nuts.
But when it comes to race, we must be exquisitely sensitive.
There's something that isn't exactly a euphemism, but that annoys me almost as much.
I can't stand it when some white guy gets up and says, As a white male, I think blah, blah, blah, blah.
I want to slap him and say, white male is how you talk about lab rats.
You're a white man.
I'll end with just one more euphemism.
When the time comes, I promise you, I'm not going to pass away.
I'm going to die.
And I hope to do it like a man.
That's Amran Podcasts at YouTube.
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