Why We Banned the Word “Ethnic” (2019)

niemanreports.org

31 pointsmkr-hn80 comments

The only thing I'm confused about is why a reporter can't use a term like "ethnic tension" as a high-level overview term and then also devote many paragraphs to explain in detail the precise meaning in that particular context. Seems like that is how reporting works in every other domain.

The point of the article is that the term "ethnic tension" is used as a crutch, in lots of places, to avoid doing the actual reporting on what conflicts are about. You can use the term and still do the work, but if you don't use the term at all, you have to do the work, hence the style guide ban.

My favorite thing is when people apply anglosphere reporting norms to the US. January 6th becomes sectarian violence as security forces clash with extremists over a contested election. It sounds just as absurd applied elsewhere, but we're so used to hearing it in that context. It all boils down to "[ethnicity] is at it again!" when applied to oft-stereotyped peoples.

That seems like a pretty reasonable summary of January 6th to me. Maybe summaries like that are fine?

What benefit is there to using the term "ethnic tension" in the high level overview over using "tension?" If you want to be imprecise, why add the additional info at all?

Probably the same reason it might be useful to say "racial bias" instead of just "bias" or "religious conflict" instead of just "conflict". It frames the topic as having a complex, historical context. Again, the reporter would then drill down into precise meanings and investigate nuanced causes.

Those two adjectives at least tell me something, that there's a racial element or a difference of religion. "Ethnic" means it could involve racism, a difference in religion, a cultural disagreement or a couple other things.

It may rule out that it's political tension or something like sports hooliganism, but even those can also be part of "ethnic tensions."

Interesting enough “racial bias” and “religious conflict” are more precise descriptors of ethnic tension.

I mostly agreed with this piece, but...

>Democratic Republic of Congo is a hotbed for what many news agencies call rebel groups, but GPJ reporters there wondered: If DRC’s president has refused to leave office even though his term ended more than two years ago, who is the real rebel? Now, GPJ uses the phrase “armed groups.”

Even if the rebellion is just, and the government illegitimate, that certainly sounds like the definition of rebellion to me.

You can be imprecise by not saying enough, and by accidentally saying too much. It sounds like here, they think the word "rebel" often says too much, connoting some splinter group off in the woods, when the organization in rebellion against the government might just as easily be the country's own military.

Surely the illegitimate government would be the rebels, they're the ones rebelling against the proper rule of law. The group that won the election is the rightful government.

Even if you disagree, it should be plain the term is ambiguous enough that it's probably better to just not use it. What is gained by calling either group "rebel" as opposed to "armed?" With either you'd need more information to have an understanding of the situation.

What a wonderful place the world might be, if only journalists would stop assuming the duties of sociologists, anthropologists, and anything else that requires a calc-based stats course to begin to get the gist of.

Arguably, anything alien to you, and 'ethnic' to something else, can use the word 'ethnic' as a valid adjective.

That use may not be idiomatic (in the sense how, say, an Indian or Chinese mainlainder would never describe a civil war between white people on US soil as 'ethnic tension' in the English language) but it's a valid use of the word from their POV.

I dislike non-idiomatic uses, as idioms have their uses in language, and not all idiomatic usages are inherently racist or sexist. (Does the word 'white flag' connote something bad? Or does the phrase 'as white and pure as snow' mean something derogatory, as it does not include other colours?)

The phrase 'ethnic tension' to me usually means some arguments between factions in a failed government, local militia forces, autocratic regimes with many tribes, etc. I don't think use of such idioms should be governed. It is definitely censorship.

>The phrase 'ethnic tension' to me usually means...

This is why it shouldn't be used. Using terms that usually mean one of a range of different things makes an article unclear. It has nothing to do with being "bad" or "derogatory."

The article made a good bit of sense until this point:

"It’s not okay to refer generally to ancient religions practiced through Africa as animism. In fact, Animism should be capitalized because it refers to a specific set of beliefs."

There's no evidence to the claim that animism is a specific set of beliefs. Animism is a category of beliefs with some common features. There are various, independently concieved animisms practiced around the world and even within the same tribe.

I wonder what the author thinks about capitalizing the words "paganism" and "mythology", since they refer to a certain beliefs held or once held.

What a wonderful article. The argument makes total sense to me.

I've always felt that US/Anglo sources are using the word as a way to subtly convey inferiority, even when they are supposedly praising someone or something.

Some people like seeing that subtle connotation of inferiority applied, as it reinforces their worldview. Hence the preference for "ethnic tensions" over more accurate, thought-provoking alternatives. There's a market for that, but it seems that Nieman Reports won't service it.

The lazy solution to a lazy problem

How is using more precise language lazy?

It's not, the editor banning words is what's lazy. Banning certain words is a symbolic action that makes it harder to use precise language.

If their journalists are lazy how would banning words fix that? If they stop telling journalists what words they can and can't use then maybe they could attract better talent.

I think any new journalist would appreciate a list of things that editors will find unacceptable complete with an explanation why it's unacceptable. It's better than getting your article's returned to you for being too vague.

They aren't addressing laziness, they're explaining what the standards are. And I don't think getting rid of those standards will attract better talent.

tl;dr - The story is about the Global Press Journal. They noticed that the word "ethnic" was almost always a red flag for "we don't really know, or care, and can't be bothered to find out, or tell our audience anything meaningful". So, they soft-banned "ethnic" in their in-house Style Guide. (It still may be used if part of a direct quote, etc.)

Sounds pretty reasonable to me.

“It’s a beautiful thing the destruction of words… In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.”

The article explicitly says that the word "ethnic" isn't bad, just inappropriate for the coverage that they're doing. If you thought Orwell was saying that it was OK to use the wrong word to describe something, you've wildly misunderstood him.

Yes, we don't say "bad" anymore. We say "inappropriate". Lol.

> So I asked dozens of Bosnians in Utica and in Bosnia to explain what sparked that war. They described generational memories of violence that had happened long ago—conflict between their forefathers and the forefathers of their neighbors. They talked about why their country was split along religious lines even though people there shared the same ancestry. They remembered the years before the civil war began, when minor slights among people who were once friends were whipped into serious grievances by nationalists on both sides.

Sounds to me like “ethnic tension” is the _right term_ to use and they’re avoiding using it because of political correctness

Who’s saying ethnic is offensive and unspeakable? We’re all saying it here…

They're avoiding it because it's vague, not because it's offensive.

"even though people there shared the same ancestry"

It's right there. They are not different ethnicities. They are different religions. The whole point of this is to avoid intellectual laziness and there you go proving their point.

ethnicity [ (eth- nis-uh-tee) ] :

Identity with or membership in a particular racial, national, or cultural group and observance of that group's customs, beliefs, and language.

Religious differences are not generally ethnic.

The article says the word isn't "inherently evil". The author argues in a well-meaning way that every usage of the word 'ethnic' would instead be better served by another word. The style guide says "Don't use it". -- It seems fair to say the article is calling it a bad word.

Just because a word is a crutch for bad reporting doesn't make the word intrinsically bad, just the wrong tool for the kind of reporting they're doing.

Yeah I blame the clickbait title. This is a style guide and “banning” the word ethnic makes complete sense after reading the argument. I’ve even felt similar when hearing the word. It’s an ambiguous filler word used when you don’t know how to describe something. I’m glad to see a news institution recognize this and raise the bar for their own writing quality.

No it doesn't. It explicitly says it isn't "inherently evil", but still implies that the word is bad at least by virtue of being imprecise.

A hammer is a bad screwdriver. That doesn't make a hammer bad.

I'm not sure what you mean exactly, but it seems that you've interpreted my interpretation of the words in the article as being isolated from the context of the article, which it isn't.

I didn't think I needed to so comprehensively elaborate on such a simple point, but for the avoidance of doubt: the article implies the word is bad for the purposes of informative and accurate journalism.

We don’t use the bare word hammer around here.

You could probably use a scaling or brick hammer as a flat bladed screwdriver in a pinch.

If you’re talking about sledges, well yeah, but that’s a ridiculous strawman (straw ungendered humanoid? Is there an acceptable replacement word yet?)

They're saying that certain categorical terms are going to be replaced with more descriptive explanations, so as to avoid relying on connotations. As always, the question is, which terms will get this treatment.

I'm sure I could be reading too much into this, but I can't help but view this editorializing under the light of the current post-modern deconstructionist wave overtaking many parts of society, journalism especially. I imagine someone shocked to discover that readers out here have a mental category for conflicts they don't follow very closely, because its contours fit their priors about constantly quarreling people. This person understands that categorization as a moral outrage, especially if the Right People (read: anyone suffering "oppression") are doing the quarrelling, and sets about to correct it and make sure nobody is able to use this evil mental category again.

Maybe this wasn't an "ethnic" conflict, but maybe it's not AP's job to tell me which conflicts to slot into my "those people are fighting again" category and which to pay renewed attention to?

I think this article is exactly the opposite of what you're criticizing. The author is saying that the phrase "ethnic tensions" was virtually always used as a lazy shorthand for "people are mad at each other for some reasons we're not sure about". They are arguing for using the full richness of the English language to describe more precisely the reason for conflict, not trying to ban a particular idea by being the word. In my opinion, Orwell would probably agree with this principle.

You're not 4 paragraphs through "Politics and the English Language" before:

Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision

The title makes this article appear like some modern bit of political correctness, but if you check it out I think this policy is basically calling out lazy journalists who defaulted to describing conflicts as something like "ethnic tension" instead of trying to investigate and figure out the complex land dispute or other nuanced issue that caused a fight.

The thing that people should be asking here is if journalists can't be bothered to get matters of life and death correct, what else are they wrong about?

> instead of trying to investigate and figure out the complex land dispute or other nuanced issue that caused a fight.

Because the original cause is often irrelevant. A random spat about land might be what sparks conflict, but ethnic tension is what fuels it and keeps it going. And yes, "ethnic" is a complex word, mixing issues of religion, culture, language, ancestry, "tribe"-level social organization and whatnot. Guess what, these things get mixed up all the time anyway, and having a single word to describe the resulting mess is highly useful. The world is complex. Deal with it.

"The ethnic tension increased. People fought because of ethnic tension. The ethnic tension led to conflict that killed people. The US President denounced the ethnic tension."

Look mom, I'm a journalist now. PayPal me, New York Times.

It feels like taking multiple complex overlapping causes and tossing one word on top of them is the opposite of dealing with complexity.

When we debug, do we tell other engineers that we're solving a "software problem," or do we use qualifiers?

On the contrary, having multiple levels of description is a key tool in dealing with complexity. You can always provide more information about the actual mix of overlapping causes pertaining to any given case, but that should come after a broader description is provided to frame the overall context.

"Software problem" is too broad. If software engineers are working on it, of course it's a software problem.

Analogously, the point the article appears to make is that if humans are involved in a civil war, of course there are ethnic tensions.

The point is saying ethnic is ambiguous in this context. So using it fails to specify what’s actually going on.

Would you be fine if someone described the troubles in Northern Ireland as ethnic tension, or knowing more about what happened would you use some other description?

> Would you be fine if someone described the troubles in Northern Ireland as ethnic tension

Why not? It's a lot more accurate than the usual description of "Protestants and Catholics" while still being simple and clear.

Yep, that's the counter argument right there. Sometimes it's better to be vaguely accurate than precisely missing much of the point.

Vaguely accurate is just another way of saying wrong.

No, "vaguely accurate" is a way of avoiding labels which are more precise and wrong. It's better to describe a disputed large quantity with the vague but accurate label of "millions" than choose a random scholar of unknown quality's estimate to 3 s.f as the correct figure.

It's better to summarise the Troubles in Northern Ireland vaguely accurately as "ethnic tensions" than precisely wrongly as a religious war between two schools of Christianity.

Saying gas is about 4$ right now is vaguely accurate, of course it’s also wrong. Consider the phrase “not even vaguely accurate” means it’s not just wrong it’s very wrong.

Being vaguely accurate on a history test may give partial credit, but the news should to be held to a higher standard.

> Why not?

Because it wasn’t purely ethnic in nature with Protestants and Catholics on both sides of the conflict. Trying to summarize it as ethic conflict was therefore also also incorrect. Which why using ethic tensions is so often misleading, it seems appropriate in many situations when it really isn’t.

I’d like to deal with it. My preferred way to deal with this complexity is to have an information diet that includes sincere attempts to capture this complexity, by reporting what is specifically happening with “ethnic tensions” in Ukraine, or the US, or Xinjiang. These are very different processes that are illuminated through details like, for instance, a “random spat” about land. It sounds like these folks are on the same page.

I can see why an organization that does international journalism would taboo “ethnic tension” on the presumption that there is a lot more to be said in order to capture the events and processed they are reporting on.

To me, it seems that you are claiming that "ethnic tension" is a pattern of human behavior which is independent of actual circumstances.

Indeed. They are encouraging use of more precise language not censoring opinions.

There is an expression "missing the forest for all the trees". Big picture abstraction, and precise details are both useful and have their place.

There is also bias when constructing a subjective big picture. Bias is more important in journalism. Perhaps editors should weigh language like this and edit publications since that is their job. It would be better to ban the word ethnicity but allow exceptions when the journalist feels it is needed and can justify it.

Indeed. One could even draw an analogy between lazy journalists who use a word like "ethnic" as a shortcut for describing the actual situation and lazy forum commenters who just toss a labored 1984 quote out instead of explaining why this instance of language modification is bad while other instances of language modification (such as the neologism "troon," a word that already had a meaning but that meaning has been redefined in common usage) are acceptable.

1984 is great because it bifurcates most responses in a revealing way: there are people who understand it as a cautionary tale against something that hasn't happened, and people who understand its many wonderful metaphors as representing recurring themes in human politics. So many of the phrases the former crowd likes to trot out would tickle Syme to death: people come up with their own NewSpeak in the form of thought-terminating cliches to opt out of reason entirely.

edit to bring it back to the topic: "ethnic" as a catch-all is actually a brilliant example of what NewSpeak is a metaphor for.

Be wary of any unfalsifiable frameworks.

Are they not also being lazy by banning the terms “ethnic cleansing”, “ethnicity” and “ethnic foods”?

No? Explain.

No they are not because phrases like forced relocation, Catholics, and sushi are more accurate.

“Ethnic food” is really what bugs me. WTF does that mean? Explain the cuisine please, I’m a foodie!

“Look in the ethnic foods isle for your matzo, dried seaweed, ghee and El Yuacteco.”

It’s basically the isle that could be labeled “packaged food for foodies”

This sort of imprecise, reductive othering illustrates what's problematic about the "ethnic foods" aisle (and "ethnic tensions").

Yeah I’d rather that stuff show up where it normally would. It’s just lazy to shove it all in an “ethnic” aisle.

Ok, so what was the holocaust?

Forced relocation? Mass killing? Both, and other things, so “cleansing”

Of who? Jews? Gypsies? Gays? Blacks? All of those, so not “religious” or “racial”. Instead, “ethnic”

Sadly, ethnic cleansing has happened repeatedly since (and before) then. It is the most precise, description that is not too narrow.

If we can’t name the crime, then how do we describe it or bring the guilty to justice?

The holocaust wasn’t an ethnic cleansing it was a genocide.

“Ethnic Cleansing” is when you force the ethnic Germans out of Kaliningrad (née Königsberg) and replace them with ethnic Russians. Genocide is when you round up the undesirables and systematically murder them.

My sincere advice is go learn a thing or two before commenting on topics like this again.

That’s what the source article is saying, but I think they’re wrong. It would be very misleading to describe something like the Bosnian War solely in terms of the political conflict about post-Yugoslav governance; a critical factor, without which the story makes no sense, is the genuine hatred between Serbs and Bosniaks that was common at the time. Srebrenica didn’t happen because a chain of escalation made it inevitable, or because some war objective put the victims tragically in the way, it happened because the Army of Republika Srpska did not think the victims’ lives were particularly important.

It is not the point of the article that actual conflicts between ethnicities should be reframed as something other than what they are; it's that their journalists have to describe the animus between Serbs and Bosniaks directly, and not roll the whole thing up into "an ethnic conflict". They're not avoiding the concept of ethnicity, just the generalizing, overly-broad (for their purposes) term.

But it's often not right to describe the animus "directly", if that's understood to mean (as they describe in the article) uncritically reporting what the people involved say about the conflict. The Troubles are the best English-language example, because there are piles and piles of primary source material with inflammatory and incompatible claims about the nature of the conflict. Was it religious, or racial, or linguistic, or geographic? All of the above and none, depending on who you ask. In fact, you'll note that "the Troubles" as a term is a response to the same issue - it would be extraordinarily unhelpful if news organizations felt obligated to choose between calling the conflict "IRA terrorism" or "British colonial aggression", even though basically every participant believed one of those two terms to be more accurate and precise.

I guess to some degree it does depend on what their purposes are, because there's value in understanding what average people in the area are thinking. But it's hard to imagine a news organization that never needs to mention a conflict without taking a position on it, and easy to imagine an organization which silently glosses over the issue because they assume there's a right side and trust the sympathetic voices they're talking to are on it.

Categorizing this policy as an Orwellian "destruction of words", when simply reading the piece makes it clear that the intent is greater accuracy, is analogous to the laziness of throwing everything into the "ethnic tensions" bucket.

Ah, but this is the first step in Orwellian destruction of words.

At this point, unless they violate this rule, no one in the press will accuse Putin of ethnic cleansing.

Instead, we get complicated, varied, descriptions of individual events (“they bombed a school”, “a rocket hit a maternity ward”). Each could be discounted as one off accidents instead of a systematic campaign.

1984 is a cargo cult. Millions of young men read it and then spend the rest of their life misapplying it.

Bold of you to assume they’ve read it first.

There is a big difference between:

a) discouraging use of clear language, in favor of euphemisms that obscure or sanitize bad acts.

b) discouraging euphemisms, in favor of clear language that sheds light on who is doing what.

I have seen this Orwell quote hurled at both things.

You made my day with this comment. Thank you for capturing so succinctly what I've often found troubling about certain appeals to Orwell — the application of Orwell to further disinformation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com