Destroying human rights with woke terminology

March 24, 2022. A Suicide Foretold: How Social Justice Rhetoric is Turning People off Human Rights. Here are the opening paragraphs. Read the entire article at the link.

Something strange is happening to the human rights discourse. Few people are paying attention, but like a cat whose hair bristles before the unknown, close observers have switched to alert mode.

What are we talking about? New phraseologies. Established human rights language giving way to slogans. Neologisms. Hyperboles and metalepses. Instances of pure linguistic engineering. Social justice rhetoric, much of it coming from a critical theory perspective, is making its way into the human rights movement.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with these innovations. Languages are living organisms. They change as the needs of speakers and societies evolve, and tropes appear when new realities emerge. New words, new uses, and new meanings make sense in their own context. Human rights aren’t a frozen monolith either. As tools to check how power is exercised, formulate grievances, and uphold dignity, human rights are open to change.

However, winning human rights battles depends on bringing ordinary people on board the human rights cause—and it starts with the language we use. As a human rights advocate and researcher, I’ve witnessed how recent rhetorical shifts are turning people off human rights. This is happening in three different ways and at three distinct levels: when we do advocacy with the general public, when we interact in the private sphere, and when we deliberate within the human rights movement itself.

Making human rights less clear: how we confuse people

Since the adoption of the Universal Declaration, in 1948, human rights have made their way into mainstream discourse. Irrespective of their political leaning, people who read the news know at least some human rights terminology: presumption of innocence, arbitrary detention, freedom of expression, the right to food, etc. From a linguistic perspective, these terms are clear.

“The clearer your message, the better chance you have to convince your audience” says a basic rule of advocacy. Yet a look at contemporary human rights paints a disturbing picture. After 75 years of efforts, human rights folks are switching to a new, vaguer rhetoric.

One of its most striking features is its reliance on buzzwords. Take, for example, the word “equity.” Like a specter in a hallway, it’s hard to describe, hard to catch, and hard to make sense of. It’s nowhere to be found in international human rights treaties, national laws, or court rulings. Its ambiguity is at odds with the glibness with which human rights folks have come to use it (try googling “vaccine equity,” “racial equity,” or “gender equity”). At a recent human rights workshop, speakers’ ad nauseam use of “equity” led a colleague of mine to ask me whether we were in fact discussing equality. Even human rights folks are lost.

Take the words “justice” and “accountability.” At first sight, they raise no issue: a large chunk of human rights work is to hold abusers to account, ensure that due process is upheld, and secure redress for victims. Yet activists have come to use these words in such an expansive fashion that common sense is unable to define them anymore. One hears about “reproductive justice,” “environmental justice,” or “accountability for women and girls in humanitarian settings.” Iteration after iteration, even human rights folks struggle to understand what “equity” means and why it’s replacing equality, or why “justice” and “accountability” are used so loosely that they can refer to any desirable social outcome. These words mean myriad things. They’ve become fetishes.

Pedagogy is built on repetition, and since advocacy is a form of pedagogy, repetition is usually good for advocacy. But the condition is to convey clear messages. If words are vague, then messages are unclear and repetition becomes counterproductive. Overusing words means spoiling them and depriving them of their value.

Let’s take a few other examples, which have triggered debate within the human rights movement. What exactly do the slogans “defunding the police” or “dismantling systemic racism” mean? The first seems to refer to anything from abolishing police to reducing purchases of heavy weapons, or reallocating funding to social programs—there are dozens of possible interpretations, some of which make sense to address police violence. Any questioning of the second can land you an accusation of racism (it’s happened to me, after 10 years of work in the human rights field). But a look at how activists use the expression leaves us to wonder: if “dismantling systemic racism” actually means “fighting racism,” why not say it this way? If it means “cracking down on racist police officers,” why not make it clear? If it means something else, why not explain it? Definitions are circular and questioning the rhetoric is met with contempt or outrage. Yet more clarity would help foster a constructive debate.