> Do you just object to the existence of the list?
I object to the existence of this particular list because I think it's extremely poorly done - to the point of being actively harmful to efforts to reduce offensive language - and would be incredibly confusing to anyone who didn't already have the fairly deep linguistic and cultural competence required to know which parts to take seriously and which parts to ignore.
I don't object to the general existence of lists of this type, but
I do think they're often subject to the same pathologies this one is.
> I still think my original question stands - why wouldn’t I want to avoid most of these terms? Isn’t the list useful if I would?
I think a huge section of this list is not helpful to anybody. "Red team", "yellow team", and "black box" have nothing to do with race whatsoever, for example, nor would a reasonable person think they did; eliminating them from your vocabulary would do no more to address racial injustice than eliminating "armadillo" would. And I do think there are costs to urging people to monitor their speech to greater and greater degrees for rapidly decreasing - and in many cases zero - benefit.
Thanks. I understand your position better now, and agree with more of it than I first thought. I don’t think our positions are so divergent as to be problematic in real life - though I suspect I will continue to monitor my speech a little more than I you think is advisable.
I wish online forums encouraged civil discussion like this more than they seem to. So much knee-jerk even here.
I object to the existence of this particular list because I think it's extremely poorly done - to the point of being actively harmful to efforts to reduce offensive language - and would be incredibly confusing to anyone who didn't already have the fairly deep linguistic and cultural competence required to know which parts to take seriously and which parts to ignore.
I don't object to the general existence of lists of this type, but I do think they're often subject to the same pathologies this one is.
> I still think my original question stands - why wouldn’t I want to avoid most of these terms? Isn’t the list useful if I would?
I think a huge section of this list is not helpful to anybody. "Red team", "yellow team", and "black box" have nothing to do with race whatsoever, for example, nor would a reasonable person think they did; eliminating them from your vocabulary would do no more to address racial injustice than eliminating "armadillo" would. And I do think there are costs to urging people to monitor their speech to greater and greater degrees for rapidly decreasing - and in many cases zero - benefit.