Biased Language in Everyday Life
And What to Do About It
I was going to come back and put a preamble here but then this article got long. Welcome to a long article for Tuesday, a day that is often, itself, long. Today I want to talk about biased—racist, sexist, ageist, ableist, and otherwise problematic—language that creeps into everyday use so insidiously that we (many of us, me included) don’t even notice it most of the time. Along the way I’ll offer some alternatives that I use when I can slip one in on the fly.
The purpose of today’s Shelf Life is not to give you a list of words you can’t use. I’m not the boss of what words you use, except don’t use utilize, it’s almost always better to just use use. That’s a freebie. When it comes to biased language, the immediate problem is not that we’re using certain words and need to stop. The immediate problem is we use a lot of these words without thinking about it and never pause to consider whether they even are biased. The first hurdle is to just listen to the words that come out of our own faceholes when we open them.
The topic came up in my workplace the other day while I was chatting with one of my peers in the IT department. My group, which published scientific journals, has recently begun discussing the related jargon single-blind and double-blind, referring to the anonymization of papers for peer review. For reference, in single-blind peer review, the reviewer knows who the author is but the author does not know who the reviewer is. In double-blind peer review, the author does not know who the reviewer is and neither does the reviewer know who the author is. (You can read about single- and double-blind peer review in this JAMA Network article.)
My colleague in IT told me there’s a similar discussion in tech circles on the appropriateness of the terms master and slave drive to refer to which hard disk in a set of two or more controls a shared interface. (You can read about some of these tech terms in this relevant CNET article from 2020.) He let me know there’s a lot of discussion in our workplace as well as in the IT sphere generally about whether it’s okay to keep using this terminology, whether to switch to new terms, how to choose a new industry-standard term, and what term should be chosen.
For hard disks, saying “primary and secondary” drive is just as easy and descriptive as saying “master and slave” drive” In peer review, we could just as easily say “single-anonymous and double-anonymous” peer review. There’s no one in the scholarly publishing editorial setting who wouldn’t immediately know what that meant, no one who would be confused—even if they had never even heard about this controversy. If I found someone in my field who had never even considered that “single-blind” and “double-blind” peer review might be problematic terms and I reached out to say “Hey does your journal do single- or double-anonymous peer review?” They would not require any clarification. To me, I can’t think of any good reason not to immediately change.
However: There will always be people who pause the conversation at this juncture to say, “But why change it? Is anyone actually offended? Are we harming real people with our language, or are we worrying about theoretical people? Are we making a change for no reason?” I agree with their instinct to pause and ask whether a change is necessary, advisable, preemptive, or what. Let’s talk about it.
First question: When and why should we change a process or standard? It’s a good question. I’m not in favor of changing stuff just for the sake of changing stuff. Sometimes things are working well and someone comes along and wants to improve on what’s already working fine, just because they want to put a feather in their cap or appear to be proactive. Before changing a process or standard that’s working, it’s always a good idea to consider why we’re doing it and what we have to gain or lose if we make a change. No doubt. If something is working for you, you need a good reason to change it. The bigger the change—the more people who will be impacted and the more the change will disrupt their norm—the better the reason has to be and the more you have to think about why you’re making a change.
Next question: Do we need knowledge of a specific individual (or individuals) being harmed by the use of this language to change it? This question follows from the previous. We’ve acknowledged that if something is working for us—say, the term single- and double-blind—then we ought to have a reason to change it. We shouldn’t change something that’s working if we don’t have a reason. So next I want to know: What’s the reason we’re suggesting the change? Because the language could be problematic. Is it problematic? We have to talk about it and figure that out.
Single- and double-blind peer review could be problematic terminology given that it relies on reference to visual impairment. That said, does it come from a place of bias? Other phrases that refer to sensory impairment like “the blind leading the blind” or to “turn a deaf ear” to something definitely come from a place of bias—they equate sensory impairment with ignorance, even willful ignorance. But to use blindness as shorthand to refer to anonymization in peer review (you literally cannot see the name of the person who reviewed your work) may not come from the same place as bias.
But: Does it necessarily matter whether the terminology comes from a place of bias? Or is it enough that we acknowledge that it comes from a place of ableist shorthand given that the change we’re thinking about implementing is so easy to make. The repercussion to making this change is a lot of people would have to change the jargon they use on a regular basis. People will sometimes make this out as a huge inconvenience but humans change the way we talk all the time without thinking about it, in response to the language patterns of the people we hang around with, the media we consume, and just what comes into and goes out of style linguistically.
Like I don’t know how to tell you this but nobody is emotionally attached to single- and double-blind peer review as a term.
Back to the question from before: Does an actual person (or actual people) need to be impacted by a term before we can discuss making a change? The example of the real person is often brought up (eg, “do people with visual impairment actually object to this language or is this being decided by those of us without visual impairment because we think they might object?”) but if the change we are making is from shorthand that refers to a disability to shorthand that does not refer to a disability, and there aren’t any drawbacks (we’re not introducing confusion, for example, as people try to figure out what the new term means), then do we need to prove harm is occurring to make the change? Or is that just a distraction?
Let me tell you, as a Queer (bisexual) person who lived through a time when “that’s gay” was the go-to insult for anything you didn’t like, if people know you belong to the group that is being invoked in a terminology shorthand like this someone will eventually either
Turn to you and ask for the record you whether you, personally, are insulted by the use? Or
State for the record that you, personally, are not insulted by the use, and so what exactly is the problem?
Not everyone put in that situation (and in every possible context) is going to be comfortable saying “Well actually, yes, it does bother me. So could you go ahead and change the common vernacular please?” And also: Even if I, personally, as a Queer person, was not at the time offended or insulted by the use of the phrase “that’s gay” as a pejorative, that doesn’t mean I have spoken officially for Every Queer Person and certified a Queer-Approved Phrase™.
How do you envision this working? Do you send me back to The Gays and I like take a vote on whether it’s okay or not? If I should say yes, I am offended, is that all it takes? One Queer person said nay so now the phrase is banned for life? As a bisexual woman, am I Gay Enough to weigh in? (I am writing these questions with sarcasm, particularly in respect to “the gays” and “gay enough.”)
So anyway, identifying language that is or could be problematic doesn’t mean you must take that language and immediately yeet it into the sun, never to be used again. If you notice that a term or phrase you use or hear a lot, or that is used regularly as jargon in your industry, comes from a problematic origin—that’s the first step. Noticing that something might be a problem. From there you talk about it, consider it, think about what the impact of the change might be, and go from there. But the first step is to be alert to the phonemes that fall out of your face sometimes when your mouth is open.
We already talked about master and slave (or: primary and secondary) drives in IT and single- and double-blind (or: single- and double anonymous) peer review processes. Here is a non-comprehensive and completely random list of some other terms that are bugaboos for me (I’m never sure if bugaboo is itself a problematic term but it sure sounds like it could be).
Handicap
We all already know we’re no longer using the term handicap to refer to a disability, handicapped to refer to disabled people or our accommodations, and so on. But what about when you’re playing golf? I do not play a lot of (or any) golf myself but this term comes up in other competitive sports and e-sports (MOBAs and fighting games) to mean an artificial disadvantage imposed upon a player of greater skill to make a match more fair versus a player of lesser skill. For instance if I were to play Guilty Gear -Strive- against my brother, he would need to take “a handicap” to make the game fair, for instance, playing with most of his buttons taped down, playing with his eyes closed, or playing with only one hand (or some combination of above).
This is an interesting one because the term handicap originally comes from games of chance and was later coined in reference to horse racing, where the weight carried by each horse depended upon how fast the horse was naturally, to try to make the race more fair. The goal was to give all participants an equitable chance at winning. It was only later that the term handicap came to refer to a person’s disability or handicapped for the person themself.
Golf probably isn’t changing anytime soon but I have hope for e-sports generally to think of a better word for imposing a disadvantage on a strong player, especially since e-sports are trying to create a culture inclusive of disabled gamers. Is it technically correct to call this a handicap? Yes. Is technically correct the best kind of correct? Not usually.
Blacklist/Black Hat and Whitelist/White Hat
These words don’t mean the same thing but they go together in the same sense in computer and information security (infosec). A blacklist in your email program is a list of addresses that cannot send you mail; if they’re blacklisted, they’re blocked. Meanwhile the whitelist is senders you’ve marked (or your organization has) as always safe, so their mail should always come through to you even if the content is suspected by your spam-catching algorithm. These terms are mirrored by Black Hat and White Hat in reference to hackers (individuals and communities of): Black hat hackers break into systems with malicious intent and for personal gain, while white hat hackers, also called security hackers, hack ethically and intend to identify vulnerabilities so they can be patched.
To blacklist someone comes from the action of “blacking out” their name on a list (crossing or scratching it out). White and black hat imagery for hackers is borrowed from old Western movies in which the good guys wore white hats and the criminals wore black hats. These terms don’t have their origin in specific racism beyond the overarching symbolism of white with good and black with bad. (Colors only have symbolic meanings if humans assign those meanings to them; colors are political- and social-value-neutral, otherwise. There are no “good” and “bad” colors.) As a rule, there’s no reason to use black and white to describe good and bad values. According to the Association for Computers and the Humanities’ page “Toward Antiracist Technical Terminology,” you can more neutrally refer to hackers as ethical and unethical. Likewise, my list of approved and blocked email senders are my denylist and my safelist.
English as a Second Language (ESL)
The phrase “English as a Second Language” bothers me for several reasons but they all boil down to this: Often when someone refers to a speaker or writer as “ESL” what they actually are trying to say is “this person’s English does not meet my standard for good English.” Expanding ESL as “English as a Subsequent Language” is already a bit better because a lot of people for whom English is not their first language, guess what, it’s not their second language either. Might be their third or twelfth. ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) is preferable for me in this case.
But, again, when people say “ESL” or even “ESOL” they aren’t always talking about people for whom English is not their first language. There are people all over the world who speak English as their first language but use a different dialect of English than what’s considered the right, good, and proper one in these United States. A person who is speaking Jamaican English, for instance, is not using the same English as we’d use for publishing a scientific paper in the United States but their first language is still English.
If you mean someone’s English is challenging for you to understand because it differs from the English you’re used to, or they have an accent you’re not familiar with, you can simply, you know, say that and not fall back on a euphemism about when, how, and how well you think they may have learned English.
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