Hey there, welcome to That Dang Dad, my name is Phil and tonight I want to discuss words. Specifically, some specific words. These are not bad words or slurs or anything like that, but they are words that make my ears prick up when I hear them because they’re words that signal to me that I should be extra… vigilant(?) about what I’m hearing?
They’re words that seem simple and self-evident, but for me, that’s what makes them so dangerous sometimes. I can’t decide whether I would call them red flags or maybe dog whistles? Dog flags?
What it really is is that, like a neutron star, these are small objects that are unbelievably dense with meaning, connotation, and ideology and I think we would do well to be cognizant of the invisible gravity they can exert. So tonight, I’d love to share them with you and talk about how some innocuous words can hide all kinds of violence.
Oh and, on a couple previous videos, a few of you mentioned that you don’t like the way I sometimes break up my videos with chapter headings and repetitive music and I just want you to know that I heard and internalized your feedback. Thank you so much for reaching out.
FLOOD
So, Flood is the word that germinated the idea for this video in the first place. Scrolling through the news the other day, I happened to see this headline: Thousands of migrants still flooding into US through El Paso each week.
The article itself is bog standard racist fear-mongering about non-whites entering the country (it’s even intentionally written to obscure when it's talking about legal visitors vs asylum seekers vs undocumented migrants). But that word Flood stood out to me because it so frequently gets used to describe Out Groups who In Groups would prefer not to be around.
Anyone who’s been in a flood can tell you: floods are scary and destructive. Once the waters begin to rise, there’s nothing that can be done to stop it, you just have to get through it. Floods destroy roads, sink cars, cover the area in gross chemical-filled water, and can even wash entire homes away. Eastern Kentucky still hasn’t recovered from last year’s floods and may never actually be totally restored. To talk about floods is to talk about something expansive and irreversible that you are totally powerless against.
So, while I understand that a large crowd of people can move in fluid ways that evoke aquatic imagery, it is interesting that you almost never see op eds and news articles written about positive, helpful “people floods”. You never hear about doctors flooding into a hospital to save lives or students flooding into a lecture hall to learn or suburban families flooding into a local park to enjoy a beautiful spring day.
During my admittedly cursory research, the kinds of people described as flooding were usually immigrants, sometimes “urban” teenagers, or groups like campers and tourists who are overwhelming a local area. The connotation is clear: when people are “flooding” somewhere, they are a burden, they are disrupting normal life, they are Causing Problems.
(Side note: wanna know what else gets described as flooding an area a lot? Drugs.)
So, this is a classic example of a simple word with a straightforward meaning that nevertheless carries some pretty heavy ideological weight behind it. If these people are a flood, they aren’t your neighbors, they aren’t your friends, they aren’t your… people. If these people are a flood, these people are a danger.
Does every editor or blogger who uses that phrase believe that or intend for that meaning to come across? Probably not, but that’s why I wanted to bring it up. We should probably be careful not to liken fellow human beings to a deadly uncontrollable disaster.
USEFUL, USELESS, EMPTY, and UNUSUED
I’m gonna put all my cards on the table, this section is like 85% drawn from Sara Ahmed’s book What’s The Use which, given the number of times I think about it and reference it, might be, like… my favorite book?
Anywho… I don’t think it’s controversial to say that we’re living through an era of unprecedented capitalist expansion into every nook and cranny currently lacking a pasty middleman charging rent. Because capitalism is a faulty system requiring infinite growth, it has to commoditize and monetize more and more aspects of our lives.
Historically, this happened when colonizers from Europe looked over at the land housing indigenous groups and decided it was empty, unused, or not being managed in a way that colonizers found “productive”. In fact, many colonizers decided the people themselves weren’t “useful” and needed to be taught a good Christian work ethic via, y’know, slavery.
For example, here’s New South Wales Governor Richard Bourke declaring all of Australia as “vacant”, which must’ve been a huge surprise to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander folks that had been living there for many thousands of years. This doctrine of “terra nullius” was used as justification for countless atrocities against indigenous people in Australia and many other places all around the world.
In 1765, William Blackstone justified British colonialism like this: “'Plantations, or colonies in distant countries, are either such where the lands are claimed by right of occupancy only, by finding them desert and uncultivated, and peopling them from the mother country; or where, when already cultivated, they have been either gained by conquest, or ceded to us by treaties. And both these rights are founded upon the law of nature, or at least upon that of nations. ”
In the capitalist colonizer mind, something being “uncultivated” makes it as good as vacant. Something that isn’t being used to its “fullest potential” might as well be up for grabs.
Skipping forward a couple hundred years, I remember once at work I was invited to participate in a kind of “innovation incubator” thing and one of the presentations was about cars. According to the presenter, the average American automobile was not being used 95% of the time. He said it was ludicrous that so many Americans paid for an asset that was only productive about 5% of the time and he used this statistic to advocate for his ideal future: cars-as-a-service, where instead of owning a car, you simply rented a self-driving car as needed through an app. That way you weren’t sitting on a “useless” asset.
And while we can debate the merits of that rentier utopia all day long, this capitalist hunt for uselessness has had much more dire consequences for humanity not so long ago.
In 1920, two German guys named Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche wrote a tract called “Permission for the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life” where they claimed the cost of caring for the sick and disabled was “a massive capital in the form of foodstuffs, clothing and heating, which is being subtracted from the national product for entirely unproductive purposes".
Of course, you probably know Karl and Alfred for coining the phrase “useless eaters” to describe disabled people. A little more than a decade later, that phrase became a central inspiration for Nazi violence against disabled people before and during the Holocaust.
Here in 2023, while the more bombastic atrocities of the Holocaust and the Age of Empire have allegedly run their course, the ideology that fueled those atrocities is alive and well in the heart of our technocratic neoliberal society, trading swastikas and ships out for global finance and austerity. A legion of would-be landlords are looking for “uncultivated” areas in your life to fence off and rent back to you, and a legion of venal politicians are colluding with them to partition off the social safety net and sell it off at the expense of those on the margins. And let’s not forget that during COVID, many people refused to mask up or get vaccinated because the disease “only” killed the elderly and disabled, meaning, only killed those who weren’t very useful.
That’s why we have to be extremely careful when we hear people described with words like useless, low skilled, unskilled, unproductive, or when people talk about those who don’t “contribute to society”. We have to be on guard when the necessities of life start being evaluated for what kind of “returns” they generate and when people start being categorized by their “usefulness”. Talk like that has historically been bad for our livelihoods and for some of us, our lives.
CLEAN, DIRTY, HEALTHY, SICK
Unfortunately, we have to return to the Holocaust for a bit because usefulness was not the only concept used against its victims. Health and cleanliness were also used in Nazi propaganda to turn the public’s hearts away from the various out groups being targeted. For example, one propaganda campaign in Nazi-occupied Poland used posters to link Jewish people to lice and typhus.
(https://perspectives.ushmm.org/item/propaganda-poster-jews-are-lice-they-cause-typhus)
This same language was used against other out groups in other places. In 1934, G. R. Gair, of the Scottish Anthropological Society, wrote that the Irish possessed "a higher ratio of criminals", and that "the Irish are more subject to certain diseases than the Nordics;" and "insanity, and other undesirable features, are greatest...in those classes in which the Irish form the greater section of the population."
In 1854, a writer in the New York Daily Tribune claimed that “[the Chinese] are uncivilized, unclean, filthy beyond all conception, without any of the higher domestic or social relations;” Later, in 1945, after thousands of Chinese seamen had outlived their usefulness (!) to the UK post-WW2, the Home Office decided to deport them instead of repatriate them. One reason given for this betrayal was that “Over half were suffering from V.D. [venereal disease] and half from T.B. [tuberculosis].”
https://journals.openedition.org/transtexts/1011#ftn9
And of course, health and cleanliness were often used as justification for the racial oppression of Black people. For example, in Chicago in 1919, white people instigated a race riot against the Black community when a Black child was found swimming at a white beach. In the aftermath, the white rioters cited their fear of Black people spreading diseases as one reason for the violence. Professor Virginia Wolcott makes the case that white fears of Black disease also contributed to housing policies in the 30s that forced Black families away from white ones, something we still feel the effects of nearly a century later.
Ah, but thank goodness we live in more enlightened times where that kind of thinking would never fly-
Infuriatingly, the myth of the disease-spreading migrant or the dirty Other persists to this day.
And, as if all that weren’t enough, there’s another side to this healthy/sick dichotomy and it has to do with the fact that we don’t always give enough thought to the fact that health and sickness are largely social constructs. I don’t want to get too deep in the weeds on this but if that sounds like a wild thing to say, stick with me.
While it’s objectively true that our bodies and minds might undergo injuries or alterations due to contact with bacteria, viruses, genetic quirks, whatever, culture and society shape the way we think about those changes, respond to them, and categorize them.
For example in 1980, Robert Crawford coined the term healthism to describe “the preoccupation with personal health as a primary focus for the definition and achievement of well-being; a goal which is to be attained primarily through the modification of life styles, with or without therapeutic help… solutions are seen to lie within the realm of individual choice. Hence, they require above all else the assumption of individual responsibility.”
Healthism feeds into the medical model of disability, a model which says an individual body is the site of specific conditions that will cause problems navigating an otherwise-neutral world.
And of course, these ideologies are nestled quite comfortably in the shadow of capitalism, which entices the medical industrial complex to sell products in need of customers. There’s a lot of money to be made if individuals have lots of illnesses and conditions they need to buy cures and accomodations for.
https://everydayfeminism.com/2017/09/proof-that-health-is-constructed/
Now, this is not to say diseases don’t exist or that you shouldn’t take medicine or get vaccinated or go to therapy or whatever. But even if you agree with healthism and the medical model of disability, you have to admit that these are political choices made by society, not unconstructed phenomena like gravity or the tides.
For example, the social model of disability says that actually, if a blind person cannot use your product, if a person using a wheelchair cannot access your building, then it is society - and really YOU the designer - that has disabled these people. It locates the responsibility for making the world navigable within all of us working together rather than putting that responsibility solely on an individual whose body or mind might be configured differently.
This idea could fuel an entire video all on its own (there are even more models we could talk about), but suffice it to say here, this is why we need to be extra careful when we start seeing words like “healthy” and “unhealthy” out in the wild. I bet if you start picking at them, you’ll find that hidden beneath these words is an assumption that it should be an individual’s moral duty and sole responsibility to maximize their physical and mental fitness and well-being and that they should fear and loathe the presence of infirmity in themselves and others. One need only look at the modern American healthcare system to see why those assumptions might be worth challenging.
LAW/ORDER/SAFE
For this last section, I just want to tell you a story.
In 2014, I was living in Minneapolis and I had just gotten hired at a job in Louisville. When I told my coworkers at the time that I was leaving, I discovered the new girl at work had just moved from Louisville. The first thing she said to me upon learning I was going to her hometown was “Alright, let me show you on the map where the safe places are.”
So we opened up Google maps and she said “Stay away from this area, it’s not safe. You’ll be fine anywhere over on this side of the city.”
My dear viewer, would you like to pause the video and spend the next 15 minutes meditating on what you think the “unsafe” part of Louisville might be known for or do you already instantly know the answer?
Of course you do. The girl was telling me to stay out of the Black part of Louisville.
She never once said the word Black but she didn’t have to: as a white person, I know what it means when another white person wants to talk about somewhere being “unsafe”. I know what it means when another white person tells me to watch out for “crime”.
And look, I’ll be honest with you, this is an area where I know I have some racism still lurking inside my own heart. As the dad of a 4 year old, when I was looking for houses in Minneapolis, finding one in a “safe” neighborhood was definitely on my mind. It’s tempting to pretend that I am simply a responsible adult making rational decisions about my housing, but I also know I didn’t ask a lot of questions if I saw neighborhood get a bad rating for crime on one of those rate my neighborhood sites.
I genuinely think everyone deserves to feel safe in their homes, on their way to school, out walking in the park. But I also know that white people often mistake being mildly uncomfortable with being terrorized at gunpoint. I know that what white people consider safe and peaceful is often code for no Blacks, no teens, no poors.
So the next time you hear a politician talking about law and order or you read someone’s comments about an unsafe part of town, give a bit of thought to whether they might be sending some secret codes to listeners who know how to hear what hasn’t been said.
CONCLUSION
As someone with a background in marketing and a hobby that involves a lot of communication, I think a lot about words and word choice. I think a lot about tone and vibe and how to evoke a mood. When I was a hiring manager, I would always drop an F-bomb near the beginning of the interview to let the applicant know I wasn’t like those stuffy suit-and-tie guys. When I write these scripts, I spend a lot of time trying to figure out whether I’m going to hurt someone’s feelings if I say “disabled people” instead of “people with disabilities” or vice versa. Those of you who complain about my long CYA preambles in videos, I know that drives you nuts.
(Am I going to get in trouble for saying “drives you nuts”? fuck!)
For me, language is this beautiful, playful mess, like a huge tub of legos that you can build anything with. You can be silly, you can be sentimental, you can be furious, or you can be a dick with just a few teensy little edits, and it’s fun for me to play in that space.
But language also has this amazing ability to sneak little ideas past our defenses, like a little mouse building a nest inside your walls. Language is full of shortcuts, nested meanings, and unspoken assumptions. A word that seems banal can, over time, wear some fairly siginificant ideological grooves into the way we think that can be hard to notice and hard to correct.
So am I saying you should never use the words Flood or Useless or Dirty or Unsafe? Of course not. As is often the case with ideology, it’s rarely this or that individual thing that’s a problem but rather the structure of society that tries to use those things to protect itself while escaping your notice.
I’m not telling you that you can or can’t use this or that word, I’m just inviting you to get curious when you hear certain words get used. I don’t want you to say No! I want you to wonder Why? I want you to investigate whether that word might be trying to sneak something into your brain that you’d rather not be there.
But be careful: once you start noticing, it gets pretty hard to UNnotice and it gets pretty annoying when other people don’t notice anything at all.
Anyway, what do you think? Any surprises on my list? Even better, tell me one of the Dogflags you watch out for that I missed. I had to cut a couple of my own for time, I wonder if any of you share them.
Thanks you so much for joining me, make sure to like subscribe lather repent, whatever. This will be my very last video filmed in Louisville Kentucky as we are on track to close on a house in Minnesota at the beginning of October. So next time I see you, I’ll be a little higher on the map
and a little higher in general… hehe sup dude…
Thanks again for joining me, hope to see you on the next one. Have a good niiiight!