‘Woke’ Language Reduces Understanding

I’m enjoying (in a perverse way) the controversy that has arisen around the discovery that New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani apparently checked the DEI box for “African American” on a college form. I don’t blame Mr. Mamdani. He was using the language our “woke” “betters” insist be used, following the incentives this system set up.

That so many people are complaining that Mr. Mamdani’s use of the “African American” language wasn’t really proper, since he’s not racially black, demonstrates again that the progressive “woke” claims to avoid offense and to be more “inclusive” accomplishes little more than to make language less precise, less clear, and more prone to misunderstanding. Thus reducing the ability of people to understand one another.

A few decades ago, our “woke” “betters” (we didn’t call them “woke” at the time, though) decided that, for some reason, calling racially black people “black” was offensive, and introduced “African-American” as a replacement.

Mr. Mamdani was born in Uganda (in Africa) to parents of Indian heritage. He did come to the United States (America) as a child (with his parents), and became a United States citizen in 2018. Consequently, checking the “African-American” box on a college form was not unreasonable.

Back in the 1990s, as “affirmative action” was in full swing and “African-American” was just coming into widespread use, a fellow church member wondered if he should claim such status, since he was born in South Africa and later immigrated to the United States before becoming an American citizen. Not for his own benefit, but for the benefit of the small waterworks engineering company for which he worked, as the company bid on a lot of government infrastructure work for government agencies that gave preferential treatment to firms that had preferred demographic populations. Ultimately, my fellow church member decided he could not in good conscious claim “African-American” status, as he knew that term was not really supposed to apply to him - he was racially very white.

I vaguely recall many years ago, some media people reporting on the Olympic Games referring to racially black athletes from countries other than the United States as “African-American.” Huh? Those athletes had nothing to do with America.

If “African-American” is really to be code-read as “racially black,” and is to be used for racially black people regardless of whether they have anything to do with America, how can we really know what somebody using the term "African-American" really means? Substituting “African-American” for “black” has only confused language, inhibiting meaningful communication and mutual understanding among people.

There are other examples of “woke” language replacing long-used and commonly understood terms with less precise, more confusing words. Apparently, in the name of reducing offense, we are supposed to be less clear in our communications. The resulting confusion over meaning and intention is more likely to create offense than the previous term ever did.