Identity Politics is a column written by veteran journalist Susan Milligan, covering the big issues in the socio-political ether as they intersect with design, art, and other modes of visual communication.
When I was a kid, you could still find a Crayola crayon color called “Flesh.” Discontinued in 1962 (but still hanging around in old coffee cans at the homes of friends with older siblings), the crayon delivered a blunt message of what Crayola considered a typical skin tone: a warm beige, only appropriate to color in the faces and limbs of white people. In retrospect, we can see how painfully racist the crayon name was and how discouraging a start it gave to Black, Hispanic or Asian children. Imagine playing with your coloring books and being told people who looked like you didn’t exist, or at least, didn’t matter.
With the Civil Rights movement burgeoning, Crayola “did the right thing” and changed the color to “Peach.” The company made a similar move in 1999, when it changed “Indian Red” to “Chestnut” (teachers complained that students thought the color was named to represent the skin tone of Native Americans).
Words matter—in culture, in advertising, and in media. They can inspire, they can sell, and they can hurt. Changes have been commensurate with the times: “housewife” was a common media moniker in an earlier era (and the title of a 1934 Bette Davis movie). The word was almost a slur in the 1970s, as the modern women’s movement gained steam, and was replaced by “homemaker” and later, “stay-at-home-mom” to avoid offending not just those who hated the paternalistic word “housewife,” but those who chose to take care of home and children and didn’t want to be lectured about it. Negro became black, which became African-American and then Black again (and now gets capitalized, as if defining someone by race instead of color is more polite). “Oriental” can describe a rug, but most of us have a visceral, negative reaction to the word if it’s used to describe an Asian person. Exoticizing an item of home décor isn’t offensive, but doing the same to an actual human being is.
The underlying premise is a laudable one: People are people and should not be defined by their characteristics. So, a person in a wheelchair is not a handicapped or disabled person but a person with a disability. The problem comes when the desire to be inclusive, or to avoid defining people by how they look or who they are, becomes so tortured as to insult or patronize the very people the speaker or writer is claiming to protect.
The comedian Gabriel “Fluffy” Iglesias tells a story onstage about purchasing some food at McDonald’s for an apparently homeless family sitting outside. The counter person chastised Iglesias for using the word “homeless,” saying they were, in fact, “unhoused,” and that Iglesias was “part of the problem” for not understanding that. (Iglesias noted in this anecdote that the grateful family described themselves as having been “homeless” for four days.) You know what’s being part of the problem? Spending your time coming up with some anesthetized way of describing someone else’s trauma, without doing something to help. Even if it’s just handing them a few Happy Meals.
Nowhere is the language-war distraction more prevalent than in matters of gender. Sincere efforts to be inclusive – of men, of women, of trans and nonbinary folks – have ended up erasing people and given a backhanded pass to those trying to do exactly that.
Latinx? It sounds like a way to remove gender identifications when none is necessary, eliminating “Latino” and “Latina.” Instead, it’s a way to literally define Hispanics and to rewrite their language, which, like nearly half of the world’s languages, happens to be gendered.
This isn’t the same as ditching unnecessarily gendered identifications of actual people. The word “stewardess” long had a kind of creepy sexual tone to it (amplified by 1970s ads featuring sexy young flight attendants saying, “I’m Cheryl. Fly Me.”). And identifying someone as a “policewoman,” for example, puts an irrelevant gender component to a job more appropriately described as “police officer.” There’s been a welcome move towards identifying workers by their actual jobs instead of their genitals.
But there’s a difference between saying gender doesn’t, or shouldn’t, matter in many situations and saying it does not exist. It’s one of the reasons women are grossly underrepresented in medical studies that could save their lives. Researchers believe women’s hormones might affect the results, so they have tended to stick with male subjects. The failure to find a way to accommodate women’s body chemistry means we also don’t have as clear an idea of how some life-saving drugs or treatments might work on women.
The “we’re pregnant” declaration has long been a way to make fathers feel included in the entire process of having a family. Now, it’s become standard for media to say “they” had an abortion. First of all, if you’re not experiencing morning sickness and varicose veins or leaking little droplets of breast milk onto your dry-clean-only blouses, you’re not pregnant. You might be expecting a baby, but let’s not pretend that the physical experience is the same for the birth mother as it is for the parent awaiting the birth.
And “they” had an abortion? It sounds like it’s involving both would-be parents, but really, the message sent is exactly the one peddled by the anti-abortion camp: that once a woman becomes pregnant, she ceases to be a person in her own right and is some sort of public incubator, a piece of property carrying another life. It dehumanizes her.
“Pregnant people” is similarly dismissive of women and their sex organs. Yes, it’s laudable and kind to be inclusive of trans and nonbinary people. But the term erases women. It also whitewashes (is there a Crayola color for that?) what is behind the right-wing movement to deny women’s reproductive rights. They aren’t trying to control people who are pregnant. They are trying to control women, and pregnancy is an easy way to do it.
Crayola has it right. They’re not pretending people don’t have different skin colors; in fact, they are doing the opposite. The company now markets a Toy of the Year award-winning “Colors of the World” 24-pack box. You can color people of any race or color.
It doesn’t erase anyone.
Susan Milligan is an award-winning veteran journalist covering politics, culture, foreign affairs, and business in Washington, DC, New York, and Eastern Europe. A former writer for the New York Daily News, the Boston Globe, and US News & World Report, she was among a team of authors of the New York Times bestseller Last Lion: The Rise and Fall of Ted Kennedy. A proud Buffalo native, Milligan lives in northern Virginia.
Header illustration by Debbie Millman.
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