Opinion | Each Day, We’re Informed to Use New Lingo. What Does That Actually Accomplish?
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I believe additionally of Nina Simone’s musicalization of Lorraine Hansberry’s phrase “To be young, gifted and Black.” Watch Simone carry out this track in Questlove’s Oscar-winning documentary, “Summer of Soul,” together with her vocal emphasis, filled with conviction, on the phrase “Black.” Singing “African American” wouldn’t — couldn’t — ring with the identical richness. Black America added which means to and wrested pleasure out of a phrase that was presupposed to have destructive connotations by considering of ourselves as stunning and decided. I’m unsure “African American,” simply as a time period, has furthered that in any respect: “To be young, gifted and African American”? Keep in mind, too, the “euphemism treadmill” described by the Harvard College psychology professor Steven Pinker, who defined in a 1994 Occasions Opinion essay: “People invent new ‘polite’ words to refer to emotionally laden or distasteful things, but the euphem...
