Decompiling Oppression #54
Sam McVeety
The entry for this week started with a note to myself regarding the word "criminalized": "I wonder whether the use of this is something that most of my readers are familiar with, or if it's an interesting thing to talk about more?" It certainly wasn't something I was familiar with five years ago, so I'll err on the side of saying too much and spend this week talking about some of the key shifts I've adopted in my own language practices, and how I see meaning in them.
So, let's start with "criminalized" (which is still racialized). It's a very small change from "criminal", and yet the underlying meaning changes considerably. To begin with, "criminalized" now implies a second actor -- someone or something that criminalizes some action. It moves away from an absolute and into the relative, and invites questions around that second actor. The implications for the object are also important. Rather than conveying an innate, durable aspect of being ("that person is a criminal"), we have a separation from action and identity ("criminalized individual", or even "someone who engaged in criminalized behavior").
The implications go far beyond semantic observations, though. Even if we don't intend it to, language often carries deeper meaning. It's hard not to see the connection between "criminal" as a durable label and the many ways that it is a lifetime designation in many contexts and places, such as lifetime disenfranchisement of people convicted of felonies in Iowa, Virginia, and Kentucky. Voting rights for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people is an especially bracing instance of the ways that criminality can be relative and constructed. Many of these laws were passed, post-Reconstruction, in overt attempts to target potential Black voters:
In the post-Reconstruction period, several Southern states tailored their disenfranchisement laws in order to bar Black male voters; targeting those offenses believed to be committed most frequently by the Black population. For example, party leaders in Mississippi called for disenfranchisement for offenses such as burglary, theft, and arson, but not for robbery or murder.
When talking about criminalized behaviors, moving from the absolute to the relative and transient also pushes us to confront our own subjective lens and context. Given the many things that have been historically criminalized (Blackness, homosexuality, alcohol, to name a few) it seems harmful to believe that our present definition of criminalized behavior will provide a durable guide for the rest of history (here's a helpful guide for creating a new crime in Washington State). By problematizing the label of "criminal" (or "felon", or "prisoner"), we also push away the implicit container of "other" that it belongs to -- for the many people who view "criminal" as something that they are not (and perhaps tell themselves: could not be, because of the choices they expect they would make).
I think it's important to acknowledge that changing language also creates tension around language access, which I don't have an easy answer to resolve. As language evolves, it can also become less accessible, not only to people who grew up speaking that language, but even more so to people who acquired it as a secondary language. This pushes us to avoid unnecessary complexity in language, though it also is perhaps an invitation to evolve language.
Language creates reality in plenty of other ways, too. The shift to using "undocumented" (or perhaps less successfully, "unauthorized") in the context of immigration carries with it the very real considerations of disrupting a persistent false narrative of immigrant criminality. In the realm of gender, much ink has been spilled over the emergence of terms like "pregnant people" and "perinatal" (vs. "maternal"). Here, too, language choices exist in the same context as the fact that nearly half of trans people have been mistreated by medical providers. It seems appropriate to close with words from Chase Strangio:
Change is hard. I get that. Trans people know that better than anyone. We have to contend with discomfort with change in every aspect of our lives.
Here are this week's invitations:
Personal: How have you seen your use of language evolve over time? What was hard to let go of? What felt hard to let go of at the time, but now feels natural?
Communal: In your communities, how do you talk to each other about evolving language? Do you do it in a way that invites growth and curiosity?
Solidarity: Support Creative Justice and their work to ask our justice system to behave differently: to view our youth through a wider lens, to trust the community to address its own needs, and to celebrate the strengths and creativity of young people navigating a complex world.
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