Told  /  Media Criticism

The Racist Politics of the English Language

How we went from “racist” to “racially tinged.”

Why the semantic somersaults when it comes to race? We never hear anti-Semitic rhetoric described as “religiously tinged,” and although the Boston Globe once referred to Trump’s “gender-tinged attack on Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton” during the spring of 2016, it was nearly alone in doing so. Imagine if, after Donald Trump’s Access Hollywood tape became public, the press had referred to Trump’s “gender-tinged” comments or claimed that he had “escalated” gender or that he was a “gender provocateur”? Such phrases turn oppression into a neutral condition. “Gender-tinged,” for example, suggests the infusion of gender into an issue but ignores the question of power—in Trumpian terms, of who grabs whom.

The expressions “racially tinged” and “racially charged” emerged during the modern civil rights movement. Newspaper databases show the same pattern as Google Ngrams: regular use began in the 1950s and ’60s, increased in the late twentieth century, and has been rampant since 2010. (“Racially provocative” also skyrocketed in the 2010s.) Historian Barbara J. Fields has written that the substitution of “race” for “racism” “transforms the act of a subject into an attribute of an object.” More than twenty-five years ago, Fields observed that “the neutral shibboleths of difference and diversity” had replaced terms such as “slavery, injustice, oppression, and exploitation.” Fields noted that such language enhanced “the authority and prestige of race,” a phrase given meaning via the creation of hierarchies of power. The scientifically incoherent concept of “race” becomes real through such speech acts, which serve to stabilize “race” as a reality rather than denaturalize it as a social construction.

Something similar is at work in the use of euphemisms which suggest that race is a fact—something that can be highlighted in a neutral way—rather than an ideology, a tool of oppression. The language of “tinged” and “charged” suggests that race can be overemphasized and exaggerated, but elides the fact that any biological notion of race is a fiction, while racism is a very real language of power. Describing Trump and others in language that uses “race” as a neutral concept, whether or not intensified by “tinged” or “charged,” suggests that race can possess both positive and negative valences. This masks that, as history tells us, phrases described as “racially tinged” always involve assertions of race hierarchy, power, and privilege.