The University of Southern California School of Social Work has decided to eliminate the world “field” from its curriculum and replace with language that is “more inclusive” and less likely to offend.
To be clear, it is not USC as a whole, only the School of Social Work.
The reasoning is simple: going out into “the field” to work “may have connotations for descendants of slavery and immigrant workers that are not benign.” In other words, using “field,” as in going out into the field to do social work, is racist, specifically anti-black and anti-immigrant.
I’m not making this up. Unfortunately, it’s not joke, either.
Folks, how much more of this are we going to have to endure? Would it help if we simply did away with that nasty, imperialistic, white privilege language of English and replace it with something else? That might be the easiest and least offensive option!
For example, we could go back the native languages of the American continent since they were here first. We could switch from English to Cherokee or Creek.
Or, since we are including immigrants in this, not just slaves, we could surrender the English language to Spanish! Because, as we all know, the Hispanic and Latin nations never sent slaves into the “campo” to work.
Wait! Doesn’t “campo” sound a lot like “campus”? It definitely sounds like “camp.” Do you know how many people have been placed in camps to work? We can’t use that word anymore because there are connotations for Russians, Jews, Christians, Japanese, and Muslim terrorists that are not benign.
Maybe this is more complicated than I thought!
Just think for a second of how many other words are also racist! What kind of language will we have left if we ban them all?
- Cotton
- Hoe
- Whip
- White
- Pick
- Row
- Soil/Dirt
- Beat
- fence
- chain
- link
- guard
- dog/hound
- rope
- knot
- string
- up
Because, when you’re already thinking about something, when it’s on your mind all the time, just about any word can be associated with that something.
The Recovering Legalist 