On Pronouns and Colonialism: Tumblr Social Justice and the English Language
TW: Racism, Suicide
A lot of people like me who grew up speaking primarily North American indigenous languages have told me they experience a sort of “Pronoun Confusion” where everything in the third person is “it”. The tree is “it” and its leaves are “they”. The grass is “it” and the blades of grass are “they”. The Governor of Texas is “it” and its campaign managers are “they”.
Many of our languages do not differentiate gender except for a handful of familial terms. We try to get the pronouns of animate people and things assigned but many of us are used to the use of a robust system of number indication coupled with a complete absence of gender identification in spoken and written language. Unfortunately, if you don’t have a marked accent in speech or writing, people assume you grew up speaking nothing but English and therefore are intentionally misspeaking.
Social Justice on Tumblr usually follows a “Shoot first, don’t ask questions, and ignore criticism” policy. At one point when I was involved in Social Justice, harassment over simple lexical missteps such as using the singular “they” instead of a different pronoun got so bad that I forced myself to read no English until my proficiency degraded noticeably enough for people to believe me when I say that I grew up multilingual and wasn’t using it as a made-up excuse.
That’s when things got ugly. One of my posts where I used “they” instead of “she” to refer to a blogger made it around and I started getting messages from several different prominent SJ bloggers (who ironically enough insist to this day they aren’t SJ bloggers). I kept the automatic notification emails but I’m having issues uploading images so here’s the transcript:
- [REDACTED] asked:
If you’re going to speak English so badly you probably shouldn’t speak at all.- [REDACTED] asked:
maybe you should just kill yourself and let your language die with you so people can’t use it as an excuse for unapologetic cissexism.- [REDACTED] asked:
you may think that you’re white-passing but u rong doe. i hope i get a chance to slip you some arsenic one day, you fake native douchecanoe.This reeks of colonialism. These were all sent by non-native Social Justice bloggers, two by white American bloggers.
By assuming that mistakes that could very well be typos are born in malicious intent and to wish the death of a historically oppressed minority language much less another person is sickening and one of the key flaws in call-out culture. The “white and non-oppressed until proven otherwise” and the “opressor-identifying if you don’t agree with me” paradigms in Tumblr Social Justice are not only incredibly counterproductive and alienating but inherently problematic. I’m not saying there’s no place for anger— I’m saying that there’s a point where the oppressed in one facet of life becomes an oppressor to another.
