The New York Times’ recently launched Race/Related project produced yet another piece aimed to appeal to the broad social justice warrior faction among its readership: “What Racial Terms Make You Cringe?” The short answer for over-sensitive Times reporters: Any term used in a conservative talking point.
This week Race/Related even employed the notorious Rachel Dolezal as a point person -- she answered readers’ questions on Facebook yesterday. Dolezal was president of the N.A.A.C.P. chapter of Spokane, Wash., before her story of being “born white” but identifying as black attracted national controversy.
Among those “cringing” NYT staffers was immigration-beat reporter and Phoenix bureau chief Fernanda Santos, a long-time activist reporters for illegals “in the shadows,” who lectured on the evil of the term "illegal immigrants" to refer to illegal immigrants.:
“Illegal immigrant” implies that the immigrant is illegal in the same way that drugs are illegal, and it creates a misleading framework to talk about immigration. Yes, there are millions of immigrants who entered the country illegally -- though there are millions more who entered the country legally, but overstayed their visas.
Illegal immigrant -- and its infamous companion, illegal alien -- are negative in nature and intent. Using them stigmatizes the subject and prevents us, all of us, from seeing the man or woman behind the label. It is pejorative and purposely demeaning because it criminalizes the person, not the act. To normalize its use is to give people license to offend.
The NYT’s liberal stylebook pretty much agrees with Santos.
Stylebook says: illegal immigrant may be used to describe someone who enters, lives in or works in the United States without proper legal authorization. But be aware that in the debate over immigration, some people view it as loaded or offensive...Do not use illegal as a noun, and avoid the sinister-sounding alien.
With that prevailing attitude, it’s not exactly a shock that Santos’ supposedly objective reporting is sympathetic to illegals. A Wednesday story showed the flip side of that bias, unleashing a "bellow" of hostility towards Trump and his supporters, in a story on a Tucson-based podcast by the union of Border Patrol agents, “Talk With Trump Gives Border Agents A Louder Voice – Influence on Immigration From a Union Podcast.”
Around the time that Donald J. Trump unofficially clinched the Republican nomination for president last May, he carved 10 minutes out of his schedule for an interview on “The Green Line,” an obscure podcast by the union of Border Patrol agents that was making its debut on a local talk-radio station.
For Mr. Trump, who had only to bellow his build-a-wall cry to stir his supporters into a frenzy, the interview offered a distinctive opportunity. He could take unchallenged digs at President Barack Obama while direct-selling his hard-line vision of border security to the very agents whose job it is to secure the border.
....the interview with Mr. Trump -- on the heels of the union’s endorsement of him, its first in a presidential primary -- amplified the podcast’s reach and profile, turning it into an influential, unfiltered and entirely one-sided political megaphone.
Like the New York Times, perhaps?
In 148 episodes (and counting), Mr. Moran and a recurring cast of agents-turned-union officials have criticized journalists, protesters, civil rights groups, Mr. Obama, the Mexican government, progressives, the “Hollywood elite” and anyone else they say has stood in the way of agents trying to do their job as they believe they should -- including the leadership of the Border Patrol.
Santos seems awfully touchy about criticism of reporters.
They have labeled reporters who cover topics in a way they do not approve as activists. Chris Cabrera, vice president of Local 3307 in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, once accused Jorge Ramos, the Univision anchor, of having a vendetta against Mr. Trump. Fox News correspondent William La Jeunesse, on the other hand, has received warm welcomes in his appearances on the show.
They have also railed against the Obama administration’s hierarchy of priorities that forced border and immigration agents to focus on only deporting serious criminals. Then, they celebrated the new hard-line attitude by Mr. Trump.
Returning to the Times’ list of “cringeworthy” terms, Hot Air’s Jazz Shaw was withering in reply.
The letter reads more like something out of a debate class syllabus at a liberal arts college than a guide to modern English usage. Let’s start with the first item on the list. Are we to eliminate all uses of the word ethnic? How about food? That seems to be fairly well embedded in the foodie culture....And when did “people of color” start getting a bad rap? One of the Times editors seems to feel that it’s “too close to colored people” but I seem to recall being told that this was actually the respectful term. (And as the leading black writer at Hot Air, at least according to my genetic testing kit results, I should know.) It took all of thirty seconds of Googling to find a raft of black and Hispanic authors at major news outlets using that term all the live long day. Might want to slow your roll on that one as well.
