An Assault on Language

Critical race theory has reached a critical point. Now they want to re-examine our language, the better to comply with a radical agenda demanding that our culture needs to be wiped clean of “systemic racism.” Even President Biden is on board with this agenda, as he made clear in his inaugural speech and since then. The language police will fit in well with the prophetic George Orwell’s 1984. What we are looking at is the real possibility of the coming of a draconian assault on language, such as Orwell’s protagonist Winston Smith endured: a governmental research department dedicated to the perfection of what in 1984 was dubbed “newspeak,” the Eleventh Edition of whose dictionary will have definitively scrubbed all words from vocabulary that could lend themselves to thought that is out of conformity with the aims of the Party. When that happens, the ubiquitous Thought Police, as Orwell called them, will no longer be necessary, because Big Brother’s aims will have been fully realized. It’s remarkable that 1984 was written in 1948, in the aftermath of World War II. Already seeded in those days, the saplings of thought control have wound their way like weeds through the American university system, into the malleable minds of the students of the rebellious mid-to-late 20th century, and now into the streets of American cities. The riots that began in 2020 are fueled by hatred: hatred of police, hatred of wealth, hatred of American culture, hatred of private property. Orwell seems to have foreseen this in his depiction of a dystopian society fueled “the Hate,” and especially “Hate Week,” an occasional event to which the fictional children would look forward with glee.

It has taken a bit longer than 36 years, but the monstrous weed has nevertheless reached fruition. And now we must address the ghastly incursion of a very real version of newspeak into our culture. Author and critical race activist Ibram X. Kendi is among the leaders of the new philosophy who recommend various ways in which this so-called systemic racism might be eliminated, and the sycophantic media are all too eager to spread the ideas. We must now look, they are saying, at the changing of words, of language, to eliminate the damaging negativity that our white forebears have embedded into the way we talk and think. Words like black Monday, black sheep, blackballing, blacklisting, and blackmail are offered as evidence to support this theory. How long before new iterations of newspeak meant to correct this “systemic racism” present themselves in our dictionaries?

It will not do simply to laugh this off as ridiculous, to scoff at it, or to suppose that simply by exposing it as fraudulent the tide of popular opinion will turn so swiftly against it as to render it oblivious, although the temptation to make this our first and perhaps only line of defense is great. Mockery, to be sure, is often a fitting immediate response, and has its place in this endeavor, even as the cutting off of weeds provides some relief to crops they are choking. But we must also have stronger fertilization than that. We must apply weed killer to the roots.

Language is not meant to be unilaterally bowdlerized. It is not one-dimensional. It is elastic, as every poet understands well. Even humor relies on this elasticity, and it should come as no surprise that the apostles of critical race theory seem to have no sense of humor at all. Language, because it is elastic, is a thing of beauty. Orwell’s newspeak developers had as a major function and aim the reduction of language to fewer words, to a greater economy of language. No need for a word like ‘bad’, because ‘ungood’ will provide a more exact meaning. Words like ‘excellent’ or ‘splendid’ can be eliminated as well, replaced in newspeak by ‘plusgood’ and ‘doubleplusgood’. Synonyms become unnecessary, and the elasticity of language is thereby removed, as it becomes hardened and precise. And thereby beauty is removed, and man ceases to be creative.

This is exactly the problem with such a singleness of definition of the word ‘black’, of changing its every usage so that it always connotes goodness. Black, as it happens, is sometimes used with evil connotations, but sometimes not. Context, as ever, determines the meaning and usage. Black sometimes connotes trouble or evil, as is the case with blackballing, blacklisting, blackmail, and so forth. But sometimes black is merely a color, and sometimes a desirable color. Black may be chosen to highlight interior design. A black refrigerator, a black picture frame, a black countertop do not connote anything troublesome, because of context. Because of the elasticity of language.

But black is also invariably used to refer to utter darkness as well, whether figuratively or in physical space. A starless night is black. And this is not, in this case, literally interchangeable with whiteness. Light is white. And so the elasticity of language only goes so far. Daytime is never dark, except when an ominous storm approaches. And when light is removed, the result is darkness, utter darkness, black of night. This is embedded in the fabric of nature. Sometimes black means trouble or evil, but sometimes not. Yet black never means daylight. And this is not racist, it is simply language at work. If we worry that all ordinary usages of blackness might be charged with racism, and so must be reprogrammed somehow, we constrict language and mitigate its elasticity. A black man is not someone white people would instinctively call evil, because we all understand the elasticity of language. For all we know, Jesus may have been a black man, or at least of a dark complexion. Was he evil? Certainly not!

Indeed the very charge of systemic racism turns out to be sinful and wrong. It descends into the very pit that it would have us all avoid. It judges people by the sheer color of their skin, although in reverse. Whiteness, for the critical race theorist, is something to be repented of. In truth the original problem with racism was not even a distaste for the color black, but actually a kind of xenophobia. People were disliked because they were different in appearance, and that was unjust and wrong. And it still is to this day, which is a primary problem with critical race theory.

And the latest iteration of critical race theory is that it also fails to understand language. It fails to distinguish the usages and elasticity of language. When it comes to physical characteristics embedded differently and severally into the pigmentation of human skin, the language of black and white is innocuous, as innocuous as whether I say that I have a black or a white washing machine. But when it comes to poetic or figurative usage, we know that to blackmail or blacklist someone is to cheat him because the deed was done under the cover of secrecy, of darkness.

It’s fascinating that nature itself, with Scripture, bears out this elasticity of language even in the creation of the world and its account. God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.  The darkness was dispersed. And this physical fact is often used to denote the difference between good and bad. “We know that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all” (I John 1:5). “I clothe the heavens with blackness, and I make sackcloth their covering” (Isaiah 50:3). To the wicked “is reserved the blackness of darkness for ever” (Jude 13). Figuratively light is good, because physically it is also good. The way the world was made lends itself perfectly to the Biblical metaphoric language.

And beauty, including beautiful elastic language, is unquestionably good, because God is himself beautiful (Psalm 27:4). And so also, language is divine: God spoke and the world was created, before any man said a word. And because man was created in God’s image, man also spoke: whatsoever Adam called each creature, that was its name (Genesis 2:19). But when man fell, he did so because he believed the serpent’s lie (why the serpent was given leave to speak is a topic for another day), and so he began to lie himself. And among his lies now is this: that language must be constricted and lose its elasticity in order to correct “systemic racism.” To take away these things is to remove the beauty of the created order, and dreadfully to misunderstand the gift that language is.