Currents

Euphemism never gets us anywhere, not if we’re operating in good faith. It’s the bubble wrap of language, the excessive yards of packing you pull out of your Amazon box… containing a small tube of lotion or a bottle of vitamins. It doesn’t protect anyone. It’s wasteful. And yet enormous amounts of linguistic labor are expended, attempting to insulate readers from simple truths.

Jessica Mitford memorably skewered this tendency in The American Way of Death (1963). She pointed to the cloying euphemisms deployed by the funeral industry: corpses embalmed and slathered with specialized cosmetics were intended to facilitate halcyon “memory pictures” for their grieving loved ones. All at enormous expense, naturally. That’s the thing about euphemism. It’s often as sinister as it is wasteful — a sweet coating around a core of arsenic. The ostensible intent to protect conceals a desire to control, manipulate, subdue, and reduce. And, of course, to profit.

As Mitford described so brilliantly, the funeral industry became — and remains — extremely skilled at manipulating people into spending exorbitant sums when they are at their most vulnerable. Euphemisms like “memory picture” are key to this strategy. The chemicals and pounds of foundation and soft lighting do almost nothing to blunt the impact a death can have on loved ones. They’re mostly just lines on the invoice. Similar gobs of Vaseline are smeared on the lenses through which we view other facets of life.

Take, for example, the word “community.” It’s suffused with warmth, evocative of our most generous, prosocial tendencies. Derived from the Latin communis, meaning “shared”, it suggests the best of what humans are capable of. Indeed, sometimes it describes exactly that. Material communities are the warp and weft of our social fabric. But in the media, and even in common discourse, “community” has become a term of convenience to describe any group of people with shared characteristics: racial, religious, political, sexual, etc. Communities form around these characteristics for a variety of reasons, such as a mutual affinity to cultural or religious practices or the need to organize politically in the face of unfair treatment. They are of particular importance to disenfranchised groups. And there is utility in referring to groups in this manner. Formal definitions, as in Merriam-Webster’s entry, account for this usage: “A body of persons or nations having a common history or common social, economic, and political interests.”

Sometimes the usage is motivated by concision rather than reductiveness. There are (perceived) consensuses among any group. Space is short, time and attention are limited, and clipped sentences are imperative. Newswriters are constrained by the form, and we are all constrained by the need to quickly sum up complicated concepts if we are to have intelligible discussions without spending hours defining every term.

However, when used carelessly, the word “community” flattens the discourse that it intends to facilitate. None of these so-called communities are monolithic. And in some cases, there are substantial rifts within these groups that go unaccounted for. That is abundantly clear among the purported LGBTQIA+ contingent.

There are, of course, voting blocs and they must be securely bound together in order to function. If an entire community espouses a certain perspective, political organizations that purport to represent their interests must take notice and act accordingly. It’s one thing for an individual to raise his or her voice in the service of a political goal. But if a cohesive body of people does so, that’s a movement that can be leveraged by political interests. Once that happens, any acknowledgment of viewpoint diversity within those groups becomes a liability.

This is how a seemingly innocuous term like “community”, often meant to represent disadvantaged demographics, can become a truly toxic euphemism. Tangentially related individuals are stuffed into the same box, and more often than not, the opinions of the loudest — the most dissatisfied, irritating, and irrational — position themselves as representative of the whole. It’s poisonous and erases the individual — ironically all without consent.

Activist leaders take it upon themselves to impose narratives on everyone who shares a given characteristic. For example, they have tantrums on behalf of anyone with Hispanic ancestry if LatinX is not used in place of Latino. This, despite overwhelming apathy or even animosity for that term among the vast majority of actual Latinos, according to survey data. Democracy and self-determination apparently matter little to those who believe they know better than the rest of humanity how to save us from ourselves. Most Latino people, it seems, have far more important concerns than the semantic heavy petting that a small contingent of obnoxious radicals has demanded. Yet, publications, administrators, left-wing activists, and (white) politicians alike insist on referring to the LatinX — or now, as the awkwardness and the unpronounceable nature of that phraseology becomes clearer even to its dwindling proponents, “Latine” — community.

So, too, gay, lesbian, and bi people, along with transgender individuals, kinksters, and a potpourri of tedious straight people trying to identify out of the original sin of their so-called privilege, have been tossed into a bubble-lined envelope addressed to “community” deliverable only to the most extreme reaches of left-activism — despite the fact that none of these cohorts are of one mind, share common politics, or necessarily agree on anything.

Now available in a conveniently pre-selected community assortment, this disjunct amalgam is ready for next-day delivery to every media outlet. Self-appointed community representatives of all stripes are eager to comment on every issue that tangentially affects them and many that don’t. Mainstream journalists represent an absolutely rapacious customer base for these blowhards and lift these fringe voices as if they were representative of those in whose name they have granted themselves the authority to speak. And so the cycle continues.

Yet, there is a simple truth concealed in the spoonful of pabulum that is the word “community”: most communities framed in this sense barely exist at all.

This sampling of the so-called community has been pre-formulated by interest groups to appear as if it offers an unbiased selection. In fact, it doesn’t. LGB people fall all over the political spectrum. So do gender-nonconforming and trans people. Members within all of these groups hotly debate complex issues that their self-appointed spokespeople consider settled and utterly unnuanced: the placement of trans women in female prisons and sports, the infusion of extreme left-wing activism into K-12 schools, and the purported “scientific consensus” that sex is not immutable or binary.

The leaders of these groups have taken great care to expunge anyone who might be considered even mildly skeptical of the latest far-left orthodoxy. Especially in American media, the “alphabet soup” crowd is presented as nearly monolithic in its interests. All gay and bi people, of course, support “affirmation” that includes removing all safeguards to medically transitioning children and think it’s a public service to perform burlesque in front of them. And all trans people feel the same. Everyone who is a loyal, participating member of the community accepts that sex (i.e. male and female) doesn’t exist in any meaningful sense.

Those who don’t toe the party line are allegedly drifting in outer darkness, easy prey for the far right. They have been excommunicated for a reason. They are, it is more than implied, antisocial and will sell out their brethren for a pittance. Because they have rightfully been cut loose by the community at large, they’ll seek any group that will have them. And, the narrative goes, the far right has captured these unfortunates, hollowed them out, and turned them into slobbering puppets, parroting [whatever]-phobic talking points and lending legitimacy to an otherwise morally bankrupt agenda.

In a small set of cases, that is probably true. (Ahem, Milo.) But using a few outliers to erase the diversity of thought in a group of tenuously related people is simply lazy reasoning and an attempt by self-appointed leaders to consolidate power and squelch any dissent. Many of the dissidents in the so-called LGBTQIA+ community are, in fact, avowed liberals and even progressives.

The term “community”, for all its positive associations, and usefulness in capturing the general sensibilities of vaguely conceived groups, has been thoroughly misused by activists to push the idea that people with superficial similarities operate according to unified politics. If you share a certain characteristic with others and perhaps have even experienced prejudice as a result, you are part of a community and others will speak on your behalf. Never mind your personal opinions.

It is for these reasons that we should handle the phraseology of “community” with far greater care so as not to collapse the diversity within groups or purport to speak on other members’ behalf in an unrepresentative way. The tip of this particular spear needs to be buried in a remote location, where the honey and poison in which it has been slathered can dissipate and disappear. That should be an argument people of all political persuasions can get behind. All we need is specificity: an adjective or two to distinguish the factions within groups that share characteristics. Or a simple plural: communities.

Published Oct 3, 2023