Word Fallacies: Why I Don’t Debate Semantics in Justice Work

It happens all too often in activist circles: someone is telling about their experience of having a traditionally oppressed identity, or, during a webinar, a facilitator uses a phrase that may be new to the person hearing it.

“Excuse me,” you’ll here, “Are those really the right words to describe what you’re talking about?”

Most often, this comes up around phrases in social justice that are unfamiliar or evoke strong emotions. Perhaps they think “white privilege” means that no white people have a tough life or that talking about “white supremacy” means we’re accusing all white people individually of being racist or, even worse, implying they affiliate with hate groups.

Sometimes it’s as simple as explaining to the person what the phrase means. Other times, though, a person digs in their heels and refuses to budge on their interpretation, preferring, instead, that we pause our social justice work to debate with them what the right words are to describe oppressive experience.

I have never found these debates to lead to productive dialogue, and I am making a commitment not to participate in them. Here’s why.

The underlying implication of semantic debates is that one can figure out what is meant by a particular idea or concept based solely on figuring out the dictionary definitions of its constituent words. To use “white privilege” as an example, one would break the concept down into the two words that make it up: white and privilege to figure out what the phrase “actually” means.

One starts to see the difficulty in this approach simply by approaching “white” in this manner. Dictionary.com lists thirty-nine definitions for the word “white,” so the question becomes which one we mean. I’ll come back to this in a moment; for now, I’ll concede that the definition everyone accepts is number three: “(of human beings) belonging to a group marked by slight pigmentation of the skin, often of European descent.”

In other words, white is referring to Caucasian people.

The word privilege isn’t quite as equally fraught, with ten different definitions. This is where is becomes confusing, though. Definition one states that privilege means “a right, immunity, or benefit enjoyed only by a person beyond the advantages of most: the privileges of the very rich.” That’s quite a big category: rights, immunities, and benefits are very different things and will have very different implications for what “white privilege” means.

To use our person earlier who believes “white privilege” means that no white person has a bad life, they would likely favor a definition that sees privilege as rights or immunities instead of merely benefits. Rights and immunities tends to place “white privilege” as a special classification that means all white people have an immunity to having worse lives than people of colors.

However, even a cursory glance of the literature will reveal that’s not what activists and academics mean when we talk about “white privilege.” Peggy McIntosh defined white privilege as “an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was “meant” to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools , and blank checks.”

This feels more like the benefits part of the definition: the privilege we’re talking about is all the benefits white folks are given merely because they are white. White privilege doesn’t mean that all people have good lives; in fact, many white folks can have terrible lives depending on their intersections with class, disability, queer, and trans identities, among others.

It just means that, if you have a bad life, it’s not BECAUSE you’re white.

The problem with this approach is that a certain group of people took a social justice concept, in this case, white privilege, and interpreted it in such a way that it is easy for the person who dislikes the concept to dismiss it out-of-hand. In fact, if they were correct, then those of us using the term “white privilege” are obviously wrong because it is just a fact that, in our day and time, there are white folks with very terrible lives.

Herein lies the problem. Words don’t have one meaning, they are malleable and will never be perfect because of that. With few exceptions, it’s impossible to simply turn to a dictionary and determine what one means by a particular word, even if one knows every dictionary definition. This is even truer with concepts and ideas: no concept or idea is simply the sum of the dictionary definitions of its words.

I said I would come back to why I was willing to concede out of thirty-nine definitions of white as the one meant here. In fact, it would be rather silly of me to claim that what was meant was the absence of light in a prism or a descriptor for tea with added milk. We’re talking about racial issues, and definition three deals with racial issues so, given the context, that’s obviously the one we mean.

Context is important to discovering the meaning of concepts: it helps you know what a person means when using a word or concept. The problem isn’t that a person is trying to figure out what a concept means; it’s that they aren’t basing their definition in the context of how they think it should be used.

This is a major problem, I argue, with many semantic debaters: they’ve taken a definition of a concept that sounds right to them and applied it to their opponents without checking in contextually to see if that’s what their opponents actually mean.

The equivocation of this is obvious: two parties arguing two different definitions for a concept. Context is important: had white nationalists originally coined the term, for instance, it might have a very different definition than it does now and we might have a different concept that describes what we mean by “white privilege.” Simply arguing using a definition your opponent doesn’t accept, regardless of what you think about the words that constitute the concept, is simply arguing in bad faith, refusing to understand what your opponent means and, thereby, nullifying any argument you may have.

Such approaches will never bring dialogue or understanding. They will merely frustrate people who are engaged in social justice struggle.

At its best and most innocent, this is a search for perfection that will never come when dealing with words. Authors labor over words for years, never able to find one that quite fits exactly with what they would have to say. Though there are certainly people who do this innocently, I think it’s worth looking at the insidious nature of such misunderstandings.

I would argue that this is actually an example of a definitional dodge fallacy, where a person attempts to salvage their argument by changing the definition of a word. We see this all the time in conservative and right-wing arguments against justice movements: it’s a way of trying to make justice dialogue look so ridiculous that you don’t have to even consider them.

For instance, by telling folks that anti-racist activists believe all white folks have an easy life, you give them the option of easily dismissing the argument out of hand and not listening any further. The person insisting this is what is meant by the term gives permission to their audience to think no further on the subject, to not read what people have actually written about white privilege, especially people of color, and go no further in their thinking.

The corollary to this is that white folks don’t actually have to confront their own privilege, the benefits society gives to them for being white, because they don’t think they have any. They’re free to continue to believe people of color are just being ridiculous and over-dramatic and go on with their lives.

But the reality is that working to divest from white privilege is one of the steps that needs to be done to end oppression in America. It’s not that we want to take away white privilege from white people, but we want all people to have the privileges white folks have regardless of their skin color and ethnicity. The semantic debate stops this work short, preventing white folks from engaging in anti-racist work or from seeing how this hard work actually benefits them as well.

Why do people do this? In the case of “white privilege,” I see it as an extreme example of fragility and defensiveness stemming from the guilt many white folks feel when we realize our legacy of violence towards people of color. We don’t want that to be reality so we define it out of existence. Then, we reason, we’re no longer complicit.

The semantics debate keeps people with privileged identities from having to think about their place in the system for very long. They realize deep down that, to accept certain concepts as true, their entire worldview would have to change. This change would bring with it discomfort and pain and maybe even loss of privilege. In other words, they would have to face how unjust the world is.

It’s a far easier thing for privileged people to ignore the unearned gains they have from society, to come home every night and watch a little escapist television and just ignore or pity how much worse other people have it. Of course, this plays into the hands of injustice because, without a critical mass of people demanding justice, there’s no reason for those in power to even give it a second thought.

The semantics debate actually makes those who debate complicit in the very injustice they are debating through inaction.

So I choose not to engage in the semantics debate. I would rather understand the experiences that people of color are trying to communicate with me than wordsmith the individual words they used. Words are malleable, multi-definitional, and constantly changing. A well-formed idea communicates much more than the sum of its individual words. Arguing using a definition that your opponent doesn’t accept is dishonest, bad faith, and would get you an “F” in any Philosophy worth its weight.

I don’t expect this strategy to go away anytime soon; after all, dealing with what your opponent has to say is a lot harder than diminishing them in the way I’ve described in this article. It’s the old rhetorical trick that, if you can make your opponent look worse than you, you’ve automatically won, regardless of who has the better argument.

I’ve used examples here from anti-racist work because it’s what is foremost on my mind after the uprisings of the last few weeks. I could have drawn on any number of oppressed groups, though, from TERFs who charge that admitting that a trans woman’s experience is the experience of a woman is somehow diminishing the rights and experience of cisgender women to gay and lesbian activists who think that asexuals saying they’re oppressed in society means they’re saying asexual people are oppressed in the same way as gay and lesbian people and more. I’m sure I could write an entire article just with examples of the semantic debate in action.

But I’m not going to participate in it. Justice is not a competition or a debate; it’s a call for the equality and liberation of all people. Besides all I’ve said, the semantics debate is just exhausting and, in work that’s already taxing, it’s unreasonable to expect people to debate their experiences, and seeking perfection is a characteristic of white supremacy culture. Oppressed people don’t have time to stop and debate words with you, and no words are ever going to be perfect. If you really want to do justice work, stop demanding that people use words that don’t offend your sensibilities and start listening to the experiences behind their ideas.