Loaded words and contested terms

You can imagine that as an English professor I believe that words matter, that language matters. And that what you call things matters quite a bit. Take, for example, my preference for using "Asian American" to refer to people of Asian ancestry/descent rather than "Oriental." It's actually not just my preference; a whole movement in the late 1960s was formed, in part, around wanting to affirm the place of Asians in America and to dismiss the notion of people as objects (because remember: only rugs are Oriental).

Two of my most recent posts have touched on the issue of loaded words and contested terms. The April 11 post about the use of the term "Concentration Camp" to talk about where Japanese Americans were detained during WWII has sparked some interest from another blog, "Is That Legal?," where Eric Muller (remember Professor Muller? I gave a plug for his excellent book American Inquisition: The Hunt for Japanese American Disloyalty during World War II) provides more nuanced examination for thinking through the use of the term "concentration camp"--particularly its charged nature and yet why it IS an accurate term to describe the situation of Japanese Americans during WWII--click here for the link to "Is That Legal?"

[If you are reading this Eric, thanks for plugging my post/blog on your blog--I'm honored!]

And in the April 12 post asking when Asian immigrants become Asian Americans, a commenter and fellow blogger, John B. of "Domestic Issue," began an interesting exchange with another commenter about the use of the phrase "miscegenation."

Now, I don't know if any of you were reading my blog this summer, but that exact phrase came up in my August 2 post relating a racist comment made to me by a woman about purity and Asian Canadians. I said in the post: "That word has such a controversial connotation--rooted in a history of race baiting." This is the history of the word:

Originally coined in 1863, the word first appeared on a hoax pamphlet entitled “Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro.” Conceived by two New York journalists, David Goodman Croly and George Wakeman, the pamphlet was an attempt to depict the Republican party explicitly as proponents of inter-racial marriage and implicitly with the propagation of mixed-race children. By doing so, the hope was that voters would reject President Lincoln in his re-election campaign, for the man who supported the emancipation proclamation was also obviously in favor of promoting not only equality of the races but inter-mixing as well. Thus from its inception, miscegenation was a word linked with political propaganda and fear mongering for the purposes of supporting segregation and defying racial equality

[taken from a talk I gave five years ago at Southern U.]

So here's the question for you, dear readers: Can loaded words and contested terms be rehabilitated? Can they escape, in the case of "concentration camp" the tragic and overwrought associations with one of the worst genocides of the 20th century? Can we use a term, like "miscegenation" to simply mean "inter-racial" without invoking its etymological roots in race baiting and its historic use as a word associated with negativity, rancor, and hatred (because whenever "miscegenation" was invoked in the mid to late 20th century it was usually done in the context of "anti-miscegenation" laws, ie: laws prohibiting inter-racial marriage, or white racist Southerners invoking the fear of "miscegenation" as a rationale for school segregation.

I suppose a few more questions to consider are:

*Why is this loaded word or contested term being used in current, contemporary usage?
*What is the purpose of this rehabilitation?
*Who is trying to use this term and for what purpose?
*Is there another term that is as accurate/precise in its meaning as the contested term? Why is it important to use the contested term rather than the less loaded word?

I'd love to hear from anyone out there with an opinion...anyone???

Book Plug: AMERICAN INQUISITION

I know I said the next post would be about the difference between individual bigotry and institutional racism, but I just finished Eric Muller's book American Inquisition: The Hunt for Japanese American Disloyalty in World War II (UNC Press) and I just wanted to put in a plug for it. First of all, it weighs in at a slim 216 pages, which includes notes and bibliography, so it's just under 150 page pages of text. Second, it's extremely well written. Muller writes elegantly and with precision--I suppose it's his training in legal writing. What impresses me about this type of concise writing is that it's not dry. Particularly when Muller tells the stories of Japanese American people whose lives were irrevocably impacted through their internment/incarceration, it's a very moving account. And finally (but this should probably have been the first thing I wrote) it's an important book--because it systematically goes through the process that the various military and non-military agencies used to evaluate who was "loyal" versus who was "disloyal" and therefore, who was deemed a threat to national security and a danger to the war effort. Muller's work is important because he clearly lays out how arbitrary, in many ways, the various cases for "loyalty" were made by the different agencies and in the last chapter in particular, he makes clear that the idea of loyalty as a barometer for who is not dangerous, or to put it a different way, to equate disloyalty with someone who is dangerous or someone who will betray the country is based on faulty logic in many ways.

I also think the book is important for the links it makes, at the end, with what happened in the past regarding civil liberties and civil rights for a specific ethnic group and our current situation, post 9/11 for Muslim and Arab Americans. In particular, there is one quote from American Inquisition that makes this link clear, and it's in a chapter that describes a case brought against the U.S. military by an internee and Nisei, George Ochikubo, who believed that his exclusion from the West Coast and detainment in an internment camp was illegal. Here is a small excerpt from Muller's book:

"For the WDC [Western Defense Command], it seems the Ochikubo case was not really about George Ochikubo, or his loyalty to the United States, or the danger that he--or, for that matter, Japan--actually posed to the West Coast. The Ochikubo case was instead mostly about making law. It was about creating legal precedent favorable to the unfettered deployment of military power against American civilians on American territory, at a moment that the military deemed an emergency" (Muller 133).

If you are interested in reading more about the book or ordering it from UNC Press, you can go to their website here.

Take a look at it--or take a look at other books that talk about the Japanese American internment. I really do feel this is an important piece of U.S. history that we should ALL know about, wherever we are in the country or wherever we are in the world. Because the Japanese American internment, from the moment it was conceived and implemented to the reparations movement and formal apology, to the current day, is one of the most American stories I know--it's one we should all know and remember.