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The Language Police What happens when we censor our own words — and the ideas they represent? By Jennifer Latson
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ou don’t have to ban words to get people to stop using them. That became evident in December, when reports emerged that White House officials were preventing health researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from using hot-button terms like “diversity” and “science-based.” This turned out to be a miscommunication — but one that revealed a great deal about the guarded way we’re using language in these polarizing times. According to the Washington Post’s original story, “The Trump administration [was] prohibiting officials at the nation’s top public health agency from using a list of seven words or phrases… in official documents being prepared for next year’s budget.” (The other five words were “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “evidence-based,” “fetus” and “transgender.”) The truth was more complicated. The “banned words” were not banned at all; they had been changed by the CDC’s own employees to eliminate triggers that might attract the wrong kind of attention from the administration — and get public health projects cut from the budget. In effect, these seven words weren’t the target of an assault from above but friendly fire from below. By replacing them with euphemisms and abstractions, the health workers revealed
their best guesses — and worst fears — about what would rub their bosses the wrong way. It’s not the first time vague wording has made its way into government documents, but as an indicator of a larger trend, it’s troubling. Self-censorship is on the rise in the U.S., according to recent surveys. And it’s a hallmark of institutionalized fear, according to Corey Robin, a professor of political science at Brooklyn College and the author of “Fear: The History of a Political Idea.” We normally associate fear-driven self-censorship with totalitarianism, but it can crop up in democracies as well, Robin explains. Brutal regimes, of course, plant the seeds of fear especially effectively. Robin quotes a psychoanalyst who lived through Uruguay’s military dictatorship during the 1970s. “Our own lives became increasingly constricted,” the psychoanalyst said. “The process of self-censorship was incredibly insidious: It wasn’t just that you stopped talking about certain things with other people — you stopped thinking them yourself. Your internal dialogue just dried up.” This is the danger of restricting speech: When people avoid discussing taboo topics, ideas themselves begin to disappear. Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of education and
history at the University of Pennsylvania and author of “The Case for Contention: Teaching Controversial Issues in American Schools,” says there’s a crucial difference between choosing our words thoughtfully to avoid demeaning others and constraining our discussion of controversial topics altogether. These days, he points out, you hear very few racist slurs on college campuses — and it’s no loss that these words have become unofficially banned. But the fact that we rarely hear an open debate about affirmative action is problematic. He was surprised to learn that a recent poll showed that 40 percent of professors oppose the consideration of race in college admissions — a stunning revelation because he’d never heard any of his colleagues voice that opinion. “Obviously it’s because a lot of us are self-censoring,” he said. “And that can’t be good for the university or for affirmative action. I’m in the 60 percent: I support affirmative action. But I understand that it’s difficult to do it well and fairly, and we inhibit our ability to do it well and fairly if we can’t speak freely about it.” Free speech is, after all, a hallmark of American democracy, broadly protected by the First Amendment. The Supreme Court has ruled that this protection doesn’t apply to speech that’s likely to cause “imminent lawless action.” But for the most part, using offensive language, including so-called hate speech, is a constitutional right. And the freedom to speak our minds is mostly a good thing, argues Mikki Hebl, a professor of psychology and management at Rice University. “People should be able
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to speak for actions they believe in. However, I do think there are exceptions, particularly when it is hate speech that is used to terrorize, intimidate, or psychologically harm certain groups of individuals who are protected by laws,” Hebl said. “And there is research that shows that discriminatory speech does psychologically and physically harm individuals.” So what’s the best way to fight the more hurtful forms of hate speech? Draconian measures are not always the best, Zimmerman believes: They can actually reinforce the beliefs of people who use derogatory, discriminatory language. And such measures can have a ripple effect, stifling speech that isn’t hateful by making certain topics off-limits. A case study in harsh punishment for hateful speech emerged last April, when Harvard University rescinded admissions offers to 10 incoming freshmen who had posted racist and obscene messages on social media. “Their behavior was unacceptable, and there should have been consequences,” but revoking their admission was not the best response, Zimmerman argued in an op-ed for the Chronicle of Higher Education. “My fear was that the penalty would not inhibit the stuff these kids were saying, which should be inhibited, but would inhibit other forms of open public discourse,” he said. “The best reply to bad speech is always more speech, not less.” Surveys confirm that college students are warier now than ever about voicing an unpopular opinion, but self-censorship isn’t just an issue on college campuses. The rest of us are increasingly wary, too. A 2017 report by The Cato Institute found that
