Damn the backlash | thearticle

Those of us who seek to set America on a path to national renewal need to pick our battles and pay attention to the backlash from our efforts — and our words. Too often colorful language

only stimulates the backlash. “Defund the police” was, for instance, plain stupidity, for no one was seriously talking about abolishing police. “Cancel culture” was similar, for it turned

out to be only a handy epithet for those who opposed it, whatever it meant. Sometimes, though, we have to paraphrase Farragut and say: damn the backlash. Full speed ahead with what is right.

Recent scholarship, especially by Eduardo Porter, Robert Putnam, and Shaylyn Romney Garrett, casts doubt on whether even the great civil rights achievements of the 1960s led to more racial

progress or more backlash, increasing opposition to the welfare state in general, thus harming poor whites as well as poor Blacks. Indeed, across a number of indicators, the circumstances of

Black Americans improved most before the major civil rights legislation of the 1960s. Life expectancy, for instance, improved most dramatically between 1905 and 1947, much less rapidly

after that, so that by 1995 the gap between Blacks and whites was about the same as it had been in 1961. More recently, the Black Lives Matter movement surely was a wake-up call to white

America about the extent of institutionalised racism in the country. Yet it overlapped with rising violent crime in the country, which only abetted the backlash. As a result, it is an open

question whether BLM increased the chances of serious reform in policing, let alone improved race relations in America. Thus, when the _Los Angeles Times_ wrote about the demand by the

Dunlap Band of Mono Indians in California to remove the term “squaw” from various locations in California, our first reaction was that this is yet another opportunity to provide fuel to the

conservative “Cancel Culture” mantra. Really, just more noise. After all, we’d skied at Squaw Valley in Lake Tahoe. There had never been any implied bigotry to the place. The 1960 Olympics

were held there. And certainly, John Wayne movies had led us to believe that “squaw” was just the term used when referring to female “Indians.” Even as liberals we asked “what’s the big

deal?” But we opened our ears. To Indigenous Americans the term “squaw” held a very different connotation, of which we’d never been made aware. Going back centuries to when female Indigenous

Americans were treated as slaves, the term had become the equivalent of “vagina”. We realized this wasn’t just noise. And, glaringly, we have four daughters. Clearly, the “Cancel Culture”

brings with it the GOP backlash. Admittedly, over the past years, some of the myriad changes being made to statues, names of sports teams, colleges, parks and indeed history, have sometimes

bordered on the silly and given us pause. For instance, most of our friends who are of Mexican heritage hate the term “LatinX.” But what is the backlash anyway? A metric for which the South

chooses to convey its grievances, post Antebellum? Is that where we’ve arrived? Forget the noise. Forget the cancel culture. But most of all, damn the backlash. It’s time we stand against

the backlash. Stand. And reject the backlash. In this instance, reject the use of the term “squaw.” Listen to those for whom the term has historical context and holds inherent disrespect.

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