Politics and American Language

FOREWORD
Politics and
the American Language
One of the folktale archetypes, according to the Aarne-Thompson
classification of these stories, tells of how “a mysterious or threatening
helper is defeated when the hero or heroine discovers his name.” In
the deep past, people knew names had power. Some still do. Calling
things by their true names cuts through the lies that excuse, buffer,
muddle, disguise, avoid, or encourage inaction, indifference, oblivi-
ousness. It’s not all there is to changing the world, but it’s a key step.
When the subject is grim, I think of the act of naming as di—
agnosis. Though not all diagnosed diseases are curable, once you
know what you’re facing, you’re far better equipped to know what
you can do about it. Research, support, and effective treatment,
as well as possibly redefining the disease and what it means, can
proceed from this first step. Once you name a disorder, you may
be able to connect to the community afflicted with it, or build one.
And sometimes what’s diagnosed can be cured.
Naming is the first step in the process of liberation. Calling
Rumpelstiltskin by his true name makes him fly into a self-
destructive rage that frees the heroine of his extortions; and though
1
v!”
2 Rebecca Solnit
fairytales are thought to be about enchantment, it’s disenchant—

ment that is often the goal: breaking the spell, the illusion, the
transformation that made someone other than herself or himself,
speechless or unrecognizable or without human form. Naming
what politicians and other powerful leaders have done in secret
often leads to resignations and shifts in power.
To name something truly is to lay bare what may be brutal or
corrupt—or important or possible—and key to the work of chang-
ing the world is changing the story, the names, and inventing or
popularizing new names and terms and phrases. The project of lib—
eration has also involved coining new terms or bringing terms that
,
were obscure into more popular use: we now talk about normaliza-
tion, extractivism, unburnable carbon; about walking while Black,
gaslighting, the prison—industrial complex and the new Jim Crow,
affirmative consent, cisgender, concern trolling, whataboutism, the
manosphere, and so much more.
The process works both ways. Think of the Trump administra-
tion’s turning family reunification, which sounds like a good thing,
into the ominous, contagious-sounding “chain migration.” Think of
the second Bush administration’s redefining torture as “enhanced
interrogation,” and how many press outlets went along with it.
Of the Clinton administration’s hollow phrase “building a bridge
to the twenty—first century,” which was supposed to celebrate the
brave new world tech would bring and disguised how much it would
return us to nineteenth—century economic divides and robber bar-
ons. Of Ronald Reagan’s introduction of the figure of the “welfare
queen,” a mythic being whose undeserving greed justified cutting
off aid to the poor and ignored the reality ofwidespread poverty.
There are so many ways to tell a lie. You can lie by ignoring
whole regions of impact, omitting crucial information, or unhitch-
ing cause and effect; by falsifying information by distortion and
Foreword 3
disproportion, or by using names that are euphemisms for violence

or slander for legitimate activities, so that the white kids are “hang-
ing out” but the Black kids are “loitering” or “lurking.” Language
can erase, distort, point in the wrong direction, throw out decoys
and distractions. It can bury the bodies or uncover them.
You can pretend there are two sides to the data on tl.
crisis and treat corporate spin doctors as deserving of eqL
ing with the overwhelming majority of scientists in the 1 i. iuu
can just avoid connecting the dots, as this country long has done
with gender violence, so that the obscene levels of domestic vio-
lence and sexual assault against women become a host of minor
and unreported stories that have nothing to do with one another.
You can blame the victim or reframe the story so that women are
chronically dishonest or delusional rather than that they are chron-
ically assaulted, because the former reaffirms the status quo as the
latter disassembles it—which is a reminder that sometimes tearing
down is constructive. There are a host ofwords used to damn wom-
en—éossy, sbrz'll, slutty, bysterz'cal are a few—that are rarely used for
men, and other words, such as uppity and exotic, carry racial freight.
You can invent conflicts Where there are none—“class versus
identity politics” ignores that all of us have both, and that a majori—
ty of people who might be termed the working class are women and
people of color. Occupy Wall Street’s slogan “We are the 99 per-
cent” insisted on a vision of a society that didn’t need to be stratified
into several classes, but in which the 1 percent—a phrase that has
stuck around and become part of the mainstream vocabulary- I
pitted themselves against the rest of us.

Precision, accuracy, and clarity matter, as gestures of respect
toward those to whom you speak; toward the subject, whether
it’s an individual or the earth itself; and toward the historical re-
cord. It’s also a kind of self-respect; there are many old cultures
4 Rebecca Solnit
‘3
in which you are, as the saying goes, as good as your word. Our
Word Is Our Weapon was the title of a compilation of the Zapatista
Subcomandante Marcos’s writings. If your word is unreliable, junk,
lies, disposable pitches, you’re nothing—a boy who cried wolf, a
windbag, a cheat.
Or so it used to be, which is why one of the crises of this mo—
ment is linguistic. Words deteriorate into a slush of vague inten-
tion. Silicon Valley seizes on phrases to whitewash itself and push
its agendas: sharing economy, disruption, connectivity, openness; terms
like surveillance capitalism push back. The current president’s verbal
abuse of language itself, with his slurred, sloshing, semi-coherent
word salad and his insistence that truth and fact are whatever he
wants them to be, even if he wants them to be different from what
they were yesterday: no matter what else he’s serving, he’s always
serving meaninglessness.
The search for meaning is in how you live your life but also in
how you describe it and what else is around you. As I say in one
of the essays in this book, “Once we call it by name, we can start
having a real conversation about our priorities and values. Because
the revolt against brutality begins with a revolt against the lan-
guage that hides that brutality.”
Encouragement means, literally, to instill courage; disintegration
means to lose integrity or integration. Being careful and precise
about language is one way to oppose the disintegration of meaning,
to encourage the beloved community and the conversations that
inculcate hope and vision. Calling things by their true names is the
workl have tried to do in the essays here.

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FOREWORD

fairytales are thought to be about enchantment, it’s disenchant—

disproportion, or by using names that are euphemisms for violence

pitted themselves against the rest of us.

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