Unmasking Language Bias With Dr. Suzanne Wertheim

Kim Clark: 00:00:00

Welcome back everybody. Well, I have the

Kim Clark: 00:00:04

honor of bringing in a guest that her work, my work, our work

Kim Clark: 00:00:13

is quite complimentary. So you're gonna find that pretty

Kim Clark: 00:00:16

much everything you need for dei communications and applying it

Kim Clark: 00:00:21

to your work on a daily basis is going to be wrapped up in this

Kim Clark: 00:00:23

conversation right here. So let's get into it. Please, Dr.

Kim Clark: 00:00:29

Susan Wirthlin, please introduce yourself, and then we'll get

Kim Clark: 00:00:32

into the questions.

Suzanne Wertheim: 00:00:34

Sure. My name is Suzanne worth time, I am

Suzanne Wertheim: 00:00:37

currently sitting in Oakland, California. I am the CEO of

Suzanne Wertheim: 00:00:42

worthwhile research and consulting, where I apply social

Suzanne Wertheim: 00:00:45

science and My academic background to real world

Suzanne Wertheim: 00:00:49

problems in the workplace, in particular problems of bias, but

Suzanne Wertheim: 00:00:53

not always.

Kim Clark: 00:00:55

You have a very particular expertise in language

Kim Clark: 00:01:00

as a linguist. So how did you get into that work, and you also

Kim Clark: 00:01:05

have a new book coming out. So tell us about the book as well.

Unknown: 00:01:10

So it's a little bit roundabout how I got into the

Unknown: 00:01:13

work, but people find it interesting. So I'm gonna go a

Unknown: 00:01:15

little deeper than you might have expected. When I graduated

Unknown: 00:01:18

college, I had student debt, like many people, and I

Unknown: 00:01:20

graduated into a recession, and I ended up with my English

Unknown: 00:01:24

degree, as a technical writer in tech. And I was so disrespected,

Unknown: 00:01:29

and my mind and abilities were so disrespected. I felt like so

Unknown: 00:01:32

much of the time, men in tech were like, boop, boop, boop,

Unknown: 00:01:35

boop, boop, and just ignoring me, then I became filled with

Unknown: 00:01:38

fear. And I was like, How can I get men to listen to me and I

Unknown: 00:01:41

literally got a PhD. I'm like, if I'm their professor, they

Unknown: 00:01:44

have to listen. So that was how I got into linguistics was

Unknown: 00:01:47

actually addressing bias in tech, which is very funny,

Unknown: 00:01:50

because I'm like, Oh, I'm full circle, like the 12 years I was

Unknown: 00:01:52

away from Jack, things actually got worse and a lot of respects.

Unknown: 00:01:55

So I come in now with inside knowledge. So in grad school, I

Unknown: 00:02:00

ended up specializing in a few kinds of linguistics, but I was

Unknown: 00:02:03

really much more grammatically focused. And I was very

Unknown: 00:02:06

interested in endangered languages. So I lived in Russia

Unknown: 00:02:09

for a year studying how people were speaking. And I was so

Unknown: 00:02:12

curious about why when you have two languages in contact, does

Unknown: 00:02:16

the dominant fancy language almost never change its

Unknown: 00:02:18

structure. But the minority language that's maybe

Unknown: 00:02:21

stigmatized, maybe contracting, ends up changing its grammar a

Unknown: 00:02:25

lot. And I didn't expect the answer to be what it was, which

Unknown: 00:02:29

was context, human context, human interactions. So in order

Unknown: 00:02:33

to write my dissertation, I had to teach myself so much about

Unknown: 00:02:37

the social meaning of language, what goes on in the

Unknown: 00:02:40

conversation? How does it relate to power structures? How does it

Unknown: 00:02:43

relate to the larger context? I thought I was writing a grammar

Unknown: 00:02:46

dissertation, and it ended up with me in my field of

Unknown: 00:02:49

linguistic anthropology. So I taught Linguistic anthropology

Unknown: 00:02:52

at various places. I was at Northwestern, I was at

Unknown: 00:02:56

University of Maryland doing research for the government,

Unknown: 00:02:58

where I had top secret clearance, which is not as

Unknown: 00:03:01

exciting as you would think. It's cool. I was at I was. Yeah,

Unknown: 00:03:06

it's pretty cool. It was, it was weird. They didn't ask the right

Unknown: 00:03:09

questions for my, they didn't ask the right questions for my

Unknown: 00:03:14

getting that security clearance. So for example, they didn't find

Unknown: 00:03:19

out that I was one person away from a whole bunch of Chechen

Unknown: 00:03:22

warlords, that was much more interesting than I thought then,

Unknown: 00:03:26

what kind of public transit I took when I was in cities that I

Unknown: 00:03:29

visited. So yeah, okay. So I was at UCLA, and I started

Unknown: 00:03:34

consulting, again, for tech, because I wanted enough money to

Unknown: 00:03:39

buy a house and Professor ing wasn't going to do it. And then

Unknown: 00:03:43

I got so frustrated with how much useful knowledge was locked

Unknown: 00:03:48

behind academic doors, and how usefully it could be applied to

Unknown: 00:03:52

so many different situations to help people who shouldn't have

Unknown: 00:03:55

to take a college course to get access to really useful stuff

Unknown: 00:03:58

that I left, and I started my own company in 2011. And so

Unknown: 00:04:02

that's how I ended up working on bias in the workplace, which is

Unknown: 00:04:07

a great application for my field of linguistic anthropology makes

Unknown: 00:04:11

a lot of things transparent to me that are very opaque to other

Unknown: 00:04:15

people. Because I got a toolkit that gives me X ray vision.

Kim Clark: 00:04:19

Excellent, excellent. And, and all of this led to your

Kim Clark: 00:04:24

up and coming book.

Unknown: 00:04:26

Yes. Up and coming very soon. It's out October 3. So,

Unknown: 00:04:33

um, yes. So there were a lot of reasons why I wrote the book. So

Unknown: 00:04:38

many people like why did you write the book I'm like, my

Unknown: 00:04:39

clients kept on asking me to like, it's kind of basic, but I

Unknown: 00:04:44

really wanted people. People came to me for two reasons. The

Unknown: 00:04:48

first was that there were problems in their workplace

Unknown: 00:04:52

because people were saying problematic things. Right. So

Unknown: 00:04:56

they were just saying Things that were problematic in

Unknown: 00:05:01

different ways that I ended up delineating in the book. But

Unknown: 00:05:04

then also people would come to me because they would say, I

Unknown: 00:05:06

want to do better, especially in 2020. Right? Suddenly, there was

Unknown: 00:05:11

this great awakening where a lot of people were like, Oh, I think

Unknown: 00:05:14

there's stuff happening in the world that I don't know about.

Unknown: 00:05:17

And my good intentions might not be good enough. This is when

Unknown: 00:05:20

there started to be a lot of talk about ally work, how can I

Unknown: 00:05:23

do ally work? How can I make the world better? How can I make my

Unknown: 00:05:27

good intentions have good impact, and people realize that

Unknown: 00:05:30

language is so complicated, and the resources out there were so

Unknown: 00:05:34

confusing, and they couldn't understand how to take this list

Unknown: 00:05:38

of words and apply them to another list of words that they

Unknown: 00:05:40

said, alright, what can you do to help? And so I was like, I'll

Unknown: 00:05:44

come to the rescue. And I put on my author, cape, and I wrote a

Unknown: 00:05:48

book that I think will solve a lot of problems for a lot of

Unknown: 00:05:51

different kinds of people. It's reverse engineered for the

Unknown: 00:05:54

biggest problems that I see. The book was designed, not what I

Unknown: 00:05:58

think is interesting, but like people needed the most the

Unknown: 00:06:01

people who come to

Kim Clark: 00:06:02

me, I hear that, I hear that. And so you're well

Kim Clark: 00:06:08

known on LinkedIn, for talking about language and inclusive

Kim Clark: 00:06:14

language. So the title of your book is the inclusive language

Kim Clark: 00:06:18

Field Guide. Correct. And so, so it's, it's, it's going to be

Kim Clark: 00:06:24

practical in nature is what I'm gathering by that title. And so

Kim Clark: 00:06:30

please help us understand what inclusive language is, how do

Kim Clark: 00:06:33

you define it?

Unknown: 00:06:36

Sure. Actually, I want it. Let me just talk about Field

Unknown: 00:06:39

Guide for a minute. There. They were, it took a long time, I'm

Unknown: 00:06:42

sure you had the same problem takes a long time to find a

Unknown: 00:06:44

title of a book, right? Yeah. And for me, inclusive language

Unknown: 00:06:48

is related to why I called it a field guide. Because a field

Unknown: 00:06:53

guide sets up a scenario and in the book, I talk about the

Unknown: 00:06:56

scenarios that are invoked by words, right, I get scientific

Unknown: 00:06:59

about it, inclusive language, and a field guide sets up a

Unknown: 00:07:02

scenario where the world is complicated and diverse. So I

Unknown: 00:07:06

hike, I have a field of wildflower guide, I've got a

Unknown: 00:07:09

birding guide, I know that the world out there is complicated.

Unknown: 00:07:13

And there are principles and patterns and behaviors that are

Unknown: 00:07:17

interesting to me that without an expert's guidance, I can't

Unknown: 00:07:21

figure it out on my own. But it's a positive thing that I

Unknown: 00:07:24

want to learn. And that's how I'm setting up this book, right?

Unknown: 00:07:27

It's not a blame and shame. It's not a viewer a bad person. It's

Unknown: 00:07:31

saying the world is really complicated and really diverse.

Unknown: 00:07:36

And there are patterns and behaviors that are linked that

Unknown: 00:07:39

you might not recognize. But let me give you this guide. Right.

Unknown: 00:07:43

And so that leads me into the idea of inclusive language,

Unknown: 00:07:45

because many people think that it's just choosing a correct

Unknown: 00:07:50

word. And I am using linguistic science to go deeper and say,

Unknown: 00:07:55

Actually, we really have to find what those patterns are those

Unknown: 00:07:58

skeletal under structures, those behaviors that link them, and

Unknown: 00:08:02

then we can do a good job. So let me tell you that I'm going

Unknown: 00:08:06

to be a little bit negative and say, inclusive language is not

Unknown: 00:08:09

problematic language. So there's lots of names that people give,

Unknown: 00:08:13

they'll say, oh, it's racist, or homophobic or transphobic.

Unknown: 00:08:16

Honestly, they might be right. But in my experience, that kind

Unknown: 00:08:19

of language is not productive. If you want people to really

Unknown: 00:08:22

assess what they're doing, and change it. When people feel

Unknown: 00:08:26

shamed. When people feel blamed, they'll often shut down and

Unknown: 00:08:29

it'll feel like touching a hot stove or something unpleasant.

Unknown: 00:08:32

So the book is really designed to be like, Hey, we're all

Unknown: 00:08:35

coming into this bias. Most of you haven't had the benefit of

Unknown: 00:08:38

the incredible training that I got, and the luxury of all the

Unknown: 00:08:41

time to do all the research that I've done. Let me give you

Unknown: 00:08:44

information to benefit you. So you can avoid language that

Unknown: 00:08:48

makes people feel like they haven't been seen that they

Unknown: 00:08:51

haven't been heard that they're not valued, that they haven't

Unknown: 00:08:55

been taken into consideration. That's what problematic

Unknown: 00:08:58

languages and inclusive language is the flip side, inclusive

Unknown: 00:09:02

language is word choice and beyond that makes people feel

Unknown: 00:09:07

seen, heard, valued, understood, taken into consideration.

Kim Clark: 00:09:12

And so how do you handle that pushback of people

Kim Clark: 00:09:15

who want to use the term inclusive language as a

Kim Clark: 00:09:18

weaponization to create polarization by or it's just

Kim Clark: 00:09:23

their misunderstanding of it and they feel defensive and lashing

Kim Clark: 00:09:27

out and saying things like oh your tone policing or you know

Kim Clark: 00:09:31

you and your political correctness and and identity

Kim Clark: 00:09:35

politics, etc. So how do you handle when especially for us

Kim Clark: 00:09:40

communicators when we are rolling out inclusive language,

Kim Clark: 00:09:43

we're trying to role model it maybe we have an inclusive

Kim Clark: 00:09:45

language guide, you know, that we want to put out there then we

Kim Clark: 00:09:50

get this kind of feedback kind of RMS on how to handle those

Kim Clark: 00:09:53

conversations.

Unknown: 00:09:56

So I've got two things in the book that come directly

Unknown: 00:10:00

From conversations with people who were having exactly that

Unknown: 00:10:02

problem, and let me briefly summarize them for you. The

Unknown: 00:10:06

first was from a dei practitioner. I used to be on a

Unknown: 00:10:11

listserv that then converted to not a listserv. So now I don't

Unknown: 00:10:14

get as many good questions as I used to. But this person was

Unknown: 00:10:17

having a problem because she was diversifying the calendar for

Unknown: 00:10:21

her company, which has multiple locations, some of which were in

Unknown: 00:10:25

the Bay Area, which has accepted certain things more than some

Unknown: 00:10:28

other areas. Although, here in the Bay Area, we're not nearly

Unknown: 00:10:31

as perfect as many people think I gazillion stories of terrible

Unknown: 00:10:35

things that have been said and done here. So. But anyway, so

Unknown: 00:10:39

she was diversifying the calendar and putting in things

Unknown: 00:10:41

like Diwali, and Women's History Month and Hispanic Heritage

Unknown: 00:10:45

Month and all of these things. And she got pushback from

Unknown: 00:10:47

people. And so she wrote to the listserv, and she said, How do I

Unknown: 00:10:51

respond, I feel really stumped. And so I wrote back a thing. And

Unknown: 00:10:54

it was my first time publicly talking about this concept

Unknown: 00:10:58

outside of the client base, which is called masking

Unknown: 00:11:00

language. I said, the problem is people are using what I call

Unknown: 00:11:03

masking language, to pretend that their particular

Unknown: 00:11:08

perspective, their particular viewpoint, is objective is

Unknown: 00:11:11

neutral is universal. They're saying, things are just fine.

Unknown: 00:11:15

And I'm thinking, your masking language is hiding that things

Unknown: 00:11:18

are just fine for some of the people, but they're not fine for

Unknown: 00:11:22

all of the people. So people who read my book, if there's masking

Unknown: 00:11:26

language being used, they can use they can identify it, and

Unknown: 00:11:29

then push back. And so here's the problem. You're using this

Unknown: 00:11:33

term. So for this particular example, it was the idea of an

Unknown: 00:11:36

objective calendar. And I'm like, dude, a calendars.

Unknown: 00:11:40

Christian, right? This is a Christian calendar, you get

Unknown: 00:11:42

Christmas off, you get Easter off, you get Sunday off. So what

Unknown: 00:11:46

if you're not Christian? What if you want to? What if you want to

Unknown: 00:11:48

take a Friday morning to go to mosque? What if you want to take

Unknown: 00:11:52

off early Friday evening, to make your Shabbos? Dinner? What

Unknown: 00:11:55

if you need to take off for Diwali? To go home to your

Unknown: 00:11:57

parents? You know, why do you have to take personal days and

Unknown: 00:12:00

somebody else doesn't. AD and BC are Christian. So there's so

Unknown: 00:12:04

many ways that this objective American calendar is actually a

Unknown: 00:12:09

dominant group calendar. So that was the first one. I don't know

Unknown: 00:12:12

if you've got any questions you want to I don't want to get only

Unknown: 00:12:15

Oh,

Kim Clark: 00:12:15

yeah, I'll add to your example that, you know,

Kim Clark: 00:12:18

whenever I, you know, often get the question of like, you know,

Kim Clark: 00:12:22

sometimes, you know, people want to challenge me, like, where do

Kim Clark: 00:12:25

you find bias in communications? Like, well just look at your

Kim Clark: 00:12:28

company calendar. You know, it's like, what are we operating

Kim Clark: 00:12:34

from? You know, this is? Let's start there. Right? You know, to

Kim Clark: 00:12:38

your point. Okay, let's go to the next example you have?

Unknown: 00:12:41

Well, and I'll say from that, that's one of the gifts of

Unknown: 00:12:44

the anthropology side of linguistic anthropology is one

Unknown: 00:12:47

of the four branches of anthropology. And it really is

Unknown: 00:12:50

focusing on the relationship between language and culture,

Unknown: 00:12:53

and how language is culture. But there's a thing where, once you

Unknown: 00:12:56

start studying what's called cultural variability, right, or

Unknown: 00:12:59

cross compare cross cultural data, you start to see that a

Unknown: 00:13:03

lot of people, there's a lot of things in somebody's world that

Unknown: 00:13:07

they think are normal, or natural, or just the way how it

Unknown: 00:13:10

is, like a, like a natural principle, like gravity or water

Unknown: 00:13:14

flows downhill, but they're not they're culturally constructed,

Unknown: 00:13:17

and water is going to flow downhill across the globe. But

Unknown: 00:13:20

your calendar is not everybody's calendar, right? You know, and

Unknown: 00:13:23

so there are a lot of things that feel very normal or natural

Unknown: 00:13:27

right now we're interrogating as a society in the US the idea

Unknown: 00:13:30

that gender is a binary, which other cultures have known for a

Unknown: 00:13:34

very long time, gender is not a binary, they've gotten

Unknown: 00:13:36

terminology, you know, and then the Nazis burned down some

Unknown: 00:13:40

important research centers in Vienna. So we got set back,

Unknown: 00:13:43

European and American research got set back a long time. So

Unknown: 00:13:47

we're finally come to coming to terms with that. Okay, so

Unknown: 00:13:52

there's masking language, and then I'll say a second thing in

Unknown: 00:13:55

the book is, my first principle is reflect reality. So we're

Unknown: 00:13:59

actually going to reflect reality as much as possible. And

Unknown: 00:14:02

sometimes it's going to sound harsher than what people think

Unknown: 00:14:05

is tough stuff. But well, we can get back to that later. The

Unknown: 00:14:08

second example I have is, a client of mine was VP of Dei, at

Unknown: 00:14:13

a rather conservative company, that in fact, they ended up

Unknown: 00:14:16

leaving because that company, kept on being obstructionist,

Unknown: 00:14:20

with the construct of communications and other things.

Unknown: 00:14:23

They were trying to roll out the person they reported to stop,

Unknown: 00:14:26

stop, stop blocked all the time. But at the time, this was early

Unknown: 00:14:30

in that person's tenure. And they said to me, hmm, I'm

Unknown: 00:14:34

getting pushed back. And this person has a disabled person in

Unknown: 00:14:37

their family. So they've got lived experience. That's not

Unknown: 00:14:40

just academic experience, where they've learned about

Unknown: 00:14:43

disability, but they've witnessed things that their

Unknown: 00:14:45

sibling has been called and seen various struggles, etc. So

Unknown: 00:14:49

they're like, I'm trying to get as better and roll out better

Unknown: 00:14:52

disability terminology, and I'm getting a lot of pushback.

Unknown: 00:14:55

People are like, it's just PC. It's just work. What can I tell

Unknown: 00:14:59

them and I'm like, Ah, I got an answer. Let's drop some science

Unknown: 00:15:02

on them. So, in linguistics, when you study Historical

Unknown: 00:15:07

Linguistics and how language changes over time, one of the

Unknown: 00:15:10

things that you look at his pitch duration, a word becoming

Unknown: 00:15:14

more negative than it was and people might know the word in

Unknown: 00:15:17

English pejorative, which means an insult, right just in itself.

Unknown: 00:15:21

So what happens is, in various cultures, there's always going

Unknown: 00:15:25

to be stigmatized identities, identities that have our lower

Unknown: 00:15:29

status that aren't seen as stigmatized in some way. Words

Unknown: 00:15:34

that are neutral, originally or technical that are used to

Unknown: 00:15:38

describe people in those groups start to get used negatively,

Unknown: 00:15:41

that pick up that taste of the stigma, they get very bad

Unknown: 00:15:45

tasting, and and they end up undergoing what we call semantic

Unknown: 00:15:49

change. So a word that started out as a descriptor becomes an

Unknown: 00:15:54

insult. Disability language is filled to the brim with well not

Unknown: 00:16:00

disability language, but former disability language is filled

Unknown: 00:16:04

with words that are just insults now, that people I think, don't

Unknown: 00:16:07

recognize come from a place that was meant to be a descriptor of

Unknown: 00:16:12

a particular kind of person. Dumb, moron, imbecile, lame.

Unknown: 00:16:19

Spam as for spastic, even just fast tick is used as a

Unknown: 00:16:23

pejorative and now I'm gonna say a word that a lot of people

Unknown: 00:16:26

don't like to say, but I'm gonna say it anyway. And that is

Unknown: 00:16:29

retarded. Right? So retarded. For my book, I looked up how

Unknown: 00:16:35

recently my mom used to teach special ed in New York State,

Unknown: 00:16:38

and I was pretty sure her classroom had the word retarded

Unknown: 00:16:41

in it, EMR. educable mentally retarded, because it was a

Unknown: 00:16:44

neutral or a technical term that New York State was using how do

Unknown: 00:16:48

we get our students into classrooms that are appropriate

Unknown: 00:16:52

for them? Oh, people who test in this kind of IQ range are gonna

Unknown: 00:16:55

go to the EMR classroom. So I said, All right, my mom retired

Unknown: 00:16:58

in 99. When did New York State stop using retarded because it

Unknown: 00:17:01

was already a pejorative when I was a kid on the schoolyard.

Unknown: 00:17:05

Right, it was definitely negative, but it was still being

Unknown: 00:17:07

used as a technical word. Now, it's such a taboo word that

Unknown: 00:17:10

people will call it the R word. People will sometimes not spell

Unknown: 00:17:14

it out. And you'll see r and then a bunch of asterisks, and

Unknown: 00:17:16

then a D. So this shows you parallel to the N word, how

Unknown: 00:17:21

stigmatize how insulting how taboo, the word has become. New

Unknown: 00:17:25

York State 2022 2022, they finally signed legislation

Unknown: 00:17:30

saying, Alright, we have to move away from this term, and we're

Unknown: 00:17:33

going to move towards intellectual disabilities. Even

Unknown: 00:17:36

the federal government is not that long ago, I can't remember,

Unknown: 00:17:39

I'm gonna say five years, eight years, like not that long ago.

Unknown: 00:17:43

So my answer that I gave to this client of mine was semantic

Unknown: 00:17:50

change is real. You can document it. And it is one of the reasons

Unknown: 00:17:55

why it may feel like oh my god, there's another term for these

Unknown: 00:17:58

people. I mean, let's talk about in this country, how often we've

Unknown: 00:18:01

changed terminology for black people, black people themselves,

Unknown: 00:18:05

right? In my lifetime, there have been a range of terms

Unknown: 00:18:08

because, unfortunately, black people in this country suffer

Unknown: 00:18:13

from being a stigmatized group in all kinds of ways. And so

Unknown: 00:18:16

when a word becomes just starts to sound like an insult, you

Unknown: 00:18:20

have to replace it. Let me end with one thing. My students

Unknown: 00:18:23

didn't really love 30 Rock the way I did, but I love 30 Rock

Unknown: 00:18:28

episode where Alec Baldwin is briefly dating Salma Hayek,

Unknown: 00:18:30

who's a nurse, and Salma Hayek is Lebanese Mexican, but she's

Unknown: 00:18:34

playing a Puerto Rican woman, right. And I grew up in New York

Unknown: 00:18:37

and was mistaken for Puerto Rican my whole New York Life.

Unknown: 00:18:41

And now that I'm in California, everybody thinks I'm Mexican,

Unknown: 00:18:43

I'm neither. But Alec Baldwin's character says to his

Unknown: 00:18:47

girlfriend, okay, so what do I call you? And she says, whether

Unknown: 00:18:51

he can? He says, No, you can say that, but what can I call you?

Unknown: 00:18:55

Right? And so this very, these very sensitive writers are

Unknown: 00:18:59

showing that they know that you can use a very technical a

Unknown: 00:19:03

standard terminology, right, a standard term for people. And it

Unknown: 00:19:07

can still sound like an insult because of the ways that it's

Unknown: 00:19:10

being used. So that is one of the main reasons why we need to

Unknown: 00:19:15

have inclusive communications because we have to reflect the

Unknown: 00:19:19

reality of semantic change and stigma.

Kim Clark: 00:19:24

Would you mind kind of walking us through the

Kim Clark: 00:19:27

process of what you know about the changing semantics around

Kim Clark: 00:19:32

the term woke? You know, it was just it wasn't it was just a

Kim Clark: 00:19:37

past tense of Wake, right? It was a net neutral term, you

Kim Clark: 00:19:41

know, just like your example. And then the black community

Kim Clark: 00:19:45

decades ago, started utilizing it and saying, You got to stay

Kim Clark: 00:19:49

woke, you got to stay work, which is alert, keep yourself

Kim Clark: 00:19:52

safe. Watch what's going on around you. And then now it has

Kim Clark: 00:19:56

been co opted as a pejorative. So it's gone some route and in

Kim Clark: 00:20:00

other words in from other marginalized groups like queer,

Kim Clark: 00:20:04

you know, has has been taken and then retaken. And so, you know,

Kim Clark: 00:20:09

so kind of help us understand this, this current context of

Kim Clark: 00:20:13

woke, anti woke, because if you just look at the term woke, and

Kim Clark: 00:20:18

if you say anti woke, or I don't want to work for a woke company,

Kim Clark: 00:20:22

you're basically saying you're choosing to be asleep, you're,

Kim Clark: 00:20:26

you're choosing to be unaware, uneducated, whatever it may be,

Kim Clark: 00:20:31

even though, you know, it seems to be a statute kind of term and

Kim Clark: 00:20:37

an ideological alignment kind of term. But if you can you help us

Kim Clark: 00:20:41

understanding that term, and what will it take to take it

Kim Clark: 00:20:45

back?

Unknown: 00:20:49

Of course, you ask a linguist with a lot of

Unknown: 00:20:51

Historical Linguistics training. And I used to run the the

Unknown: 00:20:57

world's biggest nonprofits studying language and gender. So

Unknown: 00:20:59

I'm like, Oh, these edited volumes. I'm like, in the 90s,

Unknown: 00:21:02

we were talking about this, where the language of feminism

Unknown: 00:21:05

was taken over by corporations, or by taken over by right wing

Unknown: 00:21:09

people like this is a trajectory that is documented and is

Unknown: 00:21:13

common. I'm thinking of I wish I could remember the term but when

Unknown: 00:21:16

I was young, there was a Virginia Slims ad, where it was

Unknown: 00:21:19

like taking the language of feminism to say, and you go

Unknown: 00:21:22

smoke, you know, like, there, there are these things that have

Unknown: 00:21:25

happened again, and again, again, and again. So the pattern

Unknown: 00:21:29

I'm sorry that I don't have a lot of great examples for this.

Unknown: 00:21:32

But the pattern is again and again, where there's an

Unknown: 00:21:35

appropriation of a term that's being used in one sense, and

Unknown: 00:21:39

then it becomes twisted in another sense. This is the

Unknown: 00:21:43

reverse of what you brought up with queer, which is done by the

Unknown: 00:21:46

ingroup. And the term that we use for that in linguistics is

Unknown: 00:21:49

reclamation, where there's a term that's become a pejorative,

Unknown: 00:21:53

and then it becomes reclaimed by people who first use it in group

Unknown: 00:21:56

to I think defang it, right. Like if I say queer, it doesn't

Unknown: 00:22:00

have that flavor of Oh, my God, I'm about to get beaten up by

Unknown: 00:22:03

this dude on the corner yelling queer at me, right. So there are

Unknown: 00:22:07

all of these ways that there are these different terms that deich

Unknown: 00:22:11

is another one that's being reclaimed. There are a bunch of

Unknown: 00:22:15

them that are being reclaimed. And that's in group work. That

Unknown: 00:22:19

usually isn't like language engineering, but it's just

Unknown: 00:22:21

people doing a thing because they want to, because this is

Unknown: 00:22:24

how human beings joke and use humor to make scary things less

Unknown: 00:22:27

scary. This is not that this is often I would say, so liberate,

Unknown: 00:22:33

researched, people who are like spin doctors are paid to take

Unknown: 00:22:38

ideas and transform them. So they become agitating, angry

Unknown: 00:22:43

making talking points happen, and then they diffuse out to the

Unknown: 00:22:47

population. So I would say one of them is sort of grassroots

Unknown: 00:22:50

and bottom up that in group reclamation, and the other one

Unknown: 00:22:53

is very much, um, purposeful, for I want to say nefarious. But

Unknown: 00:23:02

I mean, it really is for the various reasons that people want

Unknown: 00:23:04

an angry, uneducated, fearful populace where people don't

Unknown: 00:23:11

trust each other. So that's one thing to separate out. So I

Unknown: 00:23:15

talked about X ray vision before for me, X ray vision is my

Unknown: 00:23:18

version of when I'm giving workshops, saying woke to

Unknown: 00:23:21

people, right? So woke and X ray vision are the same thing.

Unknown: 00:23:24

There's a thing that in your former state, you couldn't see,

Unknown: 00:23:27

because your eyes were closed in your unconscious, or because

Unknown: 00:23:31

things were obscured to you because of the fog of culture,

Unknown: 00:23:34

or you haven't been trained to see through things. And I'm

Unknown: 00:23:36

like, let me give you a superpower. Wilk is like, hey,

Unknown: 00:23:39

you've been asleep, wake up. I mean, the entirety of the movie

Unknown: 00:23:43

Get Out is about this, right? And they call it the sunken

Unknown: 00:23:46

place. So what I've seen is, and people on Black Twitter do a

Unknown: 00:23:52

great job of deconstructing these things. It shows up now to

Unknown: 00:23:57

mean, I would say sort of a synonym when it's being used in

Unknown: 00:24:00

a way that's designed to agitate and denigrate, woke is used to

Unknown: 00:24:04

mean something like, what politically correct used to mean

Unknown: 00:24:08

it's sort of like the new PC, which dismisses things and says,

Unknown: 00:24:11

it's to toe the line, it's to virtue signal, it's to perform

Unknown: 00:24:16

that you care. It's um, it doesn't really have a basis in

Unknown: 00:24:20

reality, it's only because there's a thing that you feel

Unknown: 00:24:23

you have to do because of rude social pressure. And so you're

Unknown: 00:24:27

going to do that thing. And so for example, a thing that

Unknown: 00:24:30

happens is people will talk about woke casting. I've

Unknown: 00:24:33

collected some examples of this. And so people will say, the

Unknown: 00:24:37

like, they're nice things on the internet. Well, there'll be

Unknown: 00:24:39

like, political versus regular, and so everything that's like

Unknown: 00:24:43

white male straight is considered regular. And then

Unknown: 00:24:46

everything that isn't white male straight is considered

Unknown: 00:24:49

political. And it's the same thing with woke. What does it

Unknown: 00:24:52

mean are woke hiring practices? So someone on a What was I on

Unknown: 00:24:56

the other day someone put a comment on something? I get so

Unknown: 00:24:59

many interactions with people who, through the internet or

Unknown: 00:25:02

through workshops, I forget who this woman was. But it was a

Unknown: 00:25:05

black woman who said that at her business school, one of her

Unknown: 00:25:08

professors had said, about diversifying your pipeline when

Unknown: 00:25:13

recruiting, they said, Why are you going to fish in the same

Unknown: 00:25:17

pond? That's so limited, then you're gonna, you know, if

Unknown: 00:25:21

everybody's going for the same pond, you're gonna have to go

Unknown: 00:25:24

lower and lower, like we're going lower in our food chain,

Unknown: 00:25:27

you know, stuff that used to be trash fish is now regular

Unknown: 00:25:30

restaurant fish, right? But if you expand what you're fishing

Unknown: 00:25:34

for, then you can get the best fish from all the different

Unknown: 00:25:38

pawns, right? So that's a very reasonable and logical way to

Unknown: 00:25:43

look at things. So that's the kind of argumentation that

Unknown: 00:25:45

people can be used to say, Well, what about this, I think the

Unknown: 00:25:50

thing you can say to people is, for good faith people, so I

Unknown: 00:25:54

think I've decided with my book is that I don't have the energy

Unknown: 00:25:58

to try to convince people that inclusive language has value. So

Unknown: 00:26:02

if I'm going to interact with you, you have to already be at

Unknown: 00:26:05

the starting point. inclusive language has value. It's not, I

Unknown: 00:26:09

don't care, I'm not going to waste my breath, time, emotional

Unknown: 00:26:12

labor, intellectual labor, and people who are coming in,

Unknown: 00:26:15

genuinely not caring, or aggressive, or very resistant.

Unknown: 00:26:22

I'm like, go educate yourself, like Best of luck. Best of luck.

Unknown: 00:26:27

But for other people who are coming in, and really haven't

Unknown: 00:26:31

had the education that helps them see the world with the

Unknown: 00:26:34

clarity that you see, or I see, because we've had these years,

Unknown: 00:26:38

really rigorously examining how the world works, seeing

Unknown: 00:26:41

patterns, seeing patterns, and then and then fixing them, or

Unknown: 00:26:45

seeing how to address them. Somebody who comes in who just

Unknown: 00:26:48

is like, well, this feels work to me, I don't get it, then you

Unknown: 00:26:51

can work with that person and say, Well, what about this

Unknown: 00:26:54

doesn't feel real, because for me, I'm trying to reflect

Unknown: 00:26:57

reality. And then you can have a discussion that moves people to

Unknown: 00:27:01

a place where I'll say one other thing. In a lot of my workshops,

Unknown: 00:27:08

I've developed vocabulary to describe bias that is granular

Unknown: 00:27:12

and behavior based. It doesn't use identity as a reference. And

Unknown: 00:27:16

it's not high level label. It's very specific. Woke is the kind

Unknown: 00:27:21

of thing that used to be a nice shorthand for an in group. Oh,

Unknown: 00:27:25

be woke might not have noticed this thing, right? Now, it's a

Unknown: 00:27:30

label that gets people to knee jerk, dismiss something. But if

Unknown: 00:27:33

you can get people out of the high level label, and describing

Unknown: 00:27:37

in granular ways in a non accusatory way, help me

Unknown: 00:27:41

understand what this feel like, what this feels unreal to you.

Unknown: 00:27:45

Right? What in this feels like a performance and not like a good

Unknown: 00:27:49

faith effort to improve something? That's, I think, a

Unknown: 00:27:52

way to shift people. But PS like this has been going on forever.

Unknown: 00:27:57

I I wish I wish so badly. For some cranky person writing about

Unknown: 00:28:05

complaining that people are seeing you instead of Thao these

Unknown: 00:28:08

days. Right? I keep on looking like there's so many complaints

Unknown: 00:28:11

about using vai instead of urushi. Right? So many

Unknown: 00:28:16

complaints. I'm like, we did it. We did it. We moved away for

Unknown: 00:28:21

like we started using plural you for a single person hundreds of

Unknown: 00:28:25

years ago. And guess what? You're not complaining? Because

Unknown: 00:28:28

it happened a long time ago. But I'm sure there are

Unknown: 00:28:30

contemporaneous people who are like, yeah, people these days

Unknown: 00:28:33

are so influenced by the French and their vous, you know, like,

Unknown: 00:28:37

I don't want to sound French, I want to sound English. You know,

Unknown: 00:28:39

I'm sure I'm desperate for somebody be going through

Unknown: 00:28:42

archives for the time period and find those complaints because

Unknown: 00:28:46

these kinds of complaints are ongoing. People are resistant to

Unknown: 00:28:50

change. And they often think that change isn't for the

Unknown: 00:28:53

reasons that are addressing problems. They often think that

Unknown: 00:28:58

it's made up, and you got to work through a lot of people's

Unknown: 00:29:02

resistance with science.

Kim Clark: 00:29:05

Thank you. Thank you for that. Right here. I noticed

Kim Clark: 00:29:11

and it was really building up momentum. You probably hate me

Kim Clark: 00:29:14

right now. But the conversation we recorded was so good. We just

Kim Clark: 00:29:19

kept going and going. So we're gonna split it in the sake of

Kim Clark: 00:29:23

your time protecting your time. We're gonna split this

Kim Clark: 00:29:27

conversation into two different episodes. So keep a lookout and

Kim Clark: 00:29:31

find the other half. And the other part of this conversation

Kim Clark: 00:29:35

with this guest I know you're gonna love it.