Read on Twitter
this morning after posting an article disparaging fellow linguists for our paper about his practice of disparaging linguists, Pinker retweets this with his own comment, guess what, disparaging linguists
Let's start with Pinker. One of his favorite things to do is take something he doesn't like, and use racist, colonial imagery to paint it as irrational. He calls the students' misunderstanding a result of "primitive word magic" casting "a dreadful curse"
Of course the fact that the offended students were Black renders even more disturbing the fact that he's conjured up these particular metaphors that bring to mind racist caricatures of voodoo and swamp witches. Very cool.
The phrase "mindless wokism" is another case where he lets his affiliations slip. He's talking like his IDW acolytes here, people like James Lindsay and Chris Rufo, the ones actively bringing McCarthyism back like they're crop tops and chokers.
To the "cornerstone of linguistics" - to say we have abandoned this and refuse to interpret meaning in context is a blatant lie, especially ironic since he refuses to consider the reaction of the students in the context of having to live in a system that is racist against them
while at the same time it pretends to have solved racism. I refuse to judge those kids for getting a weird familiar feeling in their stomach and reaching out to their school to discuss it. It might not be what I would have done in their place, but I've never been I'm their place.
To the meat of the argument: the article's title is a fun trick, "if the US can punish Greg Patton..." framing it as an if-statement is clever because the USC didn't punish Greg Patton at all. As the National Review was eventually forced to admit:
Students misunderstood Patton, they brought it to the school. The school responded in a way that upset some other students with its treatment of Mandarin, and responded again to honor the second group of students. At no point was Patton punished. http://www.uscannenbergmedia.com/2020/09/08/usc-students-alumni-and-faculty-react-to-controversy-over-marshall-professors-use-of-a-chinese-word/
Why did the students get upset in the first place? I can't say, but probably it is quite jarring to hear something that sounds like what people usually say only when they mean to do you violence. Maybe over zoom it's harder to follow what examples are being used and why.
Maybe it's easier to assume nefarious intent when you know you live in a country where this kind of thing happens: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/duquesne-university-professor-who-used-racial-slur-class-put-leave-n1239957
Maybe it's easy to be extra sensitive to racism at school because you are made to feel out of place and devalued much of the time. https://twitter.com/badprofessors/status/1305185267192492033
So why do Pinker and McWhorter keep acting like he was punished when he wasn't? Because they have to scrounge and hunt for tiny crumbs of oppression to feed the victimhood complex on the right, because conservative grievances are what drive their sales.
Because the culture war is an old tactic of the right to fool people into thinking the excesses of the left (getting offended too easily sometimes) are as bad as those of the right (nazi rallies, murder, concentration camps). And the tactic works, not just on people on the right,
but on people in the center/center-left. If you're willing to dismiss calls to fight fascism and white supremacy because it feels like sometimes it goes a bit too far, it's because your perception is being manipulated by people like Pinker who cherry pick, exaggerate, and lie. https://twitter.com/caitlinmoriah/status/1296097638564036608
