One of the core premises of critical theory — the academic project that undergirds much of today’s progressive politics — is that controlling language is essential. Since critical theorists suggest that there is not any objective reality, and that there are only narratives imposed by oppressors, changing the meaning of words is essential to gaining and maintaining power. After all, they sure don’t believe in open debate. Some of this is subtle. The New York Times, an institution now meaningfully captured by the doctrines of critical theory, will now capitalize “Black,” for example, but will not capitalize “white” or “brown”.
I’ve read their explanation a few times and it seems to boil down to the idea that all people of African descent all around the world are somehow one single identifiable entity, while white and brown people are too diverse and variegated to be treated the same way. (The Times explains: “We’ve decided to adopt the change and start using uppercase ‘Black’ to describe people and cultures of African origin, both in the United States and elsewhere.”)
Given the extraordinary diversity of the African continent, and the vast range of cultural, ethnic, religious, and tribal differences among Americans of African descent — new immigrants and descendants of slaves, East and West Africans, people from the Caribbean and South America, and the Middle East — this seems more than a little reductionist. As Times contributor Thomas Chatterton Williams has noted, there are “371 tribes in Nigeria alone. How can even all the immigrants from Nigeria, from Igbo to Yoruba, be said to constitute a single ethnicity? Let alone belong to the same ethnicity as tenth-generation descendants from Mississippi share-croppers?” The point, of course, is to ignore all these real-life differences in order to promote the narrative that critical race theory demands: All that matters is oppression.
Andrew Sullivan, “China Is a Genocidal Menace”, New York, 2020-07-03.
August 9, 2025
QotD: The New Newspeak
2 Comments
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
[…] RACISM, STRAIT UP: QotD: The New Newspeak […]
Pingback by Instapundit » Blog Archive » RACISM, STRAIT UP: QotD: The New Newspeak — August 10, 2025 @ 02:32
There is also more genetic diversity in Africa than the rest of the world combined. The chief argument for the ‘Out of Africa’ hypothesis.
Comment by Tom — August 10, 2025 @ 03:00