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The link between the color black and negative feelings exists beyond language, and it has 0% to do with anyone's race. Furthermore, the negative association is with the deep black color of funeral clothes, not with the brown color of most black people's skin.

Even more, the color black itself has many different connotations, and not all are negative. It is for example a color of formal prestige (black belt, black ribbon). It is high-contrast (the situation is black and white). It is the color of things which don't emit light (black body radiation, black hole). It is also the color of many bronze statues, and also of ebony - both often used to depict saints and Jesus himself all in black since medieval times.

Humans are perfectly capable of keeping context in mind, and connotations from one context don't actually bleed into other contexts all that much.

The missing representation of black people in European and American art is a different problem, and it is a real problem that won't be addressed by replacing black box with opaque box.

Not bleeding across "all that much" might well be true, though I disagree since it's kinda the whole strength of the human brain applying learning from one area to another, that's why we're more intelligent than animals and have been more adaptable to new problems. You're also thinking about this in terms of conscious decision making when in our day to day lives we rarely sit down with an open mind and properly think about things.

But even if it is not all that much, it's still there. A million people having a 1% shift in their views due to language adds up. That's why we're seeing groups of individuals who aren't racist/sexist somehow reach answers that statistically do appear to be.

The specifics of which uses are neutral or not is the next debate. Step 1 is acknowledging that language is something that feeds into the "nurture" side of how we think, especially since language is such a large part of our learning during early brain development. With that in mind, it's something that should be debated and selection of words should be considered.

If there actually was even a 1% universal association of the color black with evil (instead of the more specific associations that happen in certain contexts), do you really think anyone in medieval times would have created representations of Jesus, Mary and other highly revered figures in black wood or metal?

It is up to anyone claiming such an effect exists to go and prove it with solid data, enough data to overturn hundreds of years of language use. And if such a link actually exists, and someone actually believes in it, then I would like to see them insist people don't wear black (or red, yellow, brown or whatever other color they think is racialized) to funerals.

Edit: I also want to comment on the idea that the brain's ability to generalize would apply to meaning bleeding between separate contexts that use the same words. I think this is a misunderstanding of how the brain works. Concepts used in our thought later get translated into (spoken/written) language, or back again when listening/reading. But, the concepts are not the words that they are represented by. The black of a funeral is not the same concept as the black used to refer to a black person, even though they use the same word or symbol. Just like I'm not applying anything I know about mice scurrying through my house to the mouse I'm holding in my hand while playing (even though the origin of the word is exactly that animal), there is no reason to think there is any transfer whatsoever between the various meanings of black, even if they are related.

If you're waiting for someone to find a case of someone joining the KKK because they once heard about a blacklist, of course that is never going to happen. This is about one facet of learning that happens over 20 years of someones childhood, and then trying to link it to statistical issues that emerge over large groups. If it were even possible to isolate all the different factors to just look at language, it would take generations to test.

This is where we're coming at it from different sides. I think changing language is a relatively cheap and easy thing to do, that might help fix an issue in some small way, and there's really not much reason not to. The cause and effect is plausible, if not provable on any reasonable timescale.

Metaphor, simile, pathetic fallacy are all powerful tools that really do change the way we interpret the substance of what we read. Colours too, it's not a coincidence the major tech brands have gone with various blues, those blues are deliberately designed to nudge people towards a particular emotional response that is completely unrelated to the brand itself. If word selection really did nothing to change the impression of what we read, then writers and poets would be out of a job.

In NASCAR the color black is legendary for reasons I truly hope don't need to be explained

>The link between the color black and negative feelings exists beyond language

We should probably just stop calling people "black" then.

This is the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and it has been disproved many times. Language certainly affects how you think in the way you turn sentences (a french speaker speaking in english will definitely word and think of things relative to how french behaves), but the theory that using words that could eventually have had a racial history in the very specific context of the United States would affect you on a deep level is utter bullshit.

The issue with "man up" or "stop being a girl" isn't language, it's patriarchal habits having ingrained in many of us that men don't cry, men don't talk, men are strong. It's not the words used that kill you, it's the social construct.

> It's not the words used that kill you, it's the social construct

How does the social construct get perpetuated except through words?

By every single sense and aspect of you.

Hearing those words is a thing, yes. Men wearing floral perfumes will be shamed for it (patriarchy sees this as feminine). Men will receive less gentle physical touches, caresses, care, either in an expectation that it makes them weaker, or that they don't need it. Men are expected to dress a certain way.

Men don't commit suicide _just_ because they're told to man up and deal with it. They do it because of a socially enforced dreadful lack of emotional comfort. A hug doesn't need words to comfort someone, not being judged or looked at wrongly for going away from the mold doesn't need words to comfort someone. That's why it's a social construct, not a verbal construct. It permeates everything around you.

No. It’s not that simple. Yes there is a legacy of cultural practices to contend with, but it isn’t this all encompassing reality you imagine.

Consider that levels of affection afforded to men (or harshness they are expected to endure) vary significantly across cultures and very much between subcultures in a modern nation like the US. It’s trivial to find groups of people who are very positive about affection vs people who are very traditional within a few miles of each other.

These groups speak very differently about their ideas of masculinity (since you introduced that example) and will make different arguments about what is right. Those arguments absolutely do inform group members and newcomers alike about what is considered acceptable.

Language is of course not everything - people do learn through mimicry, but you might be surprised how easy it is to use language to get someone to try something they didn’t think was for them. Advertisers do this all the time.

I don’t really see how someone can sit there with a straight face and say language doesn’t matter because of patriarchy.

Also patriarchy doesn’t ‘see’ anything because patriarchy isn’t a person and doesn’t have eyes. Patriarchy is an academic term for a set of ideas, not a mystical being.

The point is that they get perpetuated through any words. "Ban" a word and a phrase will take its place.

This is very visible in the words used for those with mental disabilities. They used to be called "idiots" by doctors. Then, as idiot became a common insult, doctors moved on to "<people with a> mental retard". When that became a common insult, they moved on to "mentally challenged" and so on. This will be a never-ending arms-race though: as long as people insist on insulting others by comparing them to those that have a mental disability, they will always pick up the current medical terminology for them and use it as an insult.

Note that I'm not saying we should be calling children with Down syndrome "idiots" or "retards". Even though the "fight" will probably be endless, it's worth it not to use known derogatory terms for your pacients. Similarly, even though racists and other bigots can express their bigotry even with perfectly neutral language, it doesn't mean we should accept the use of slurs.

But it's also important not to get a false impression that just because Richard Spencer isn't using the n-word to refer to black people (in public), it means he's not being racist. You can always use language to teach others to hate BIPOC and ask for them to be thrown out of the country, along with LGBTQIA+ people if you're at it.

> Language absolutely affects how we think, the brain makes links subconsciously and learns all the time from all inputs, so I don't think it's sensible to dismiss the idea of language making small differences to how we think.

This is true enough, the problem is going from the conclusion that these negative associations will have any real-world impact. Recent reviews of implicit association tests (IAT) suggest that they correlate with nothing but brain activity.