We have a problem: One way to produce serious social change is to use new words, words that  make us uncomfortable because they deliberately collide with the conventional wisdom. To great effect, the women's movement did this with the switch from Miss or Mrs. to Ms.; and one principal theme of this blog is that we need to substitute the word fusion for words like "race", mixed race, half, exotic, tragic mulatto, and god help us, half breed.

  The problem is that, beginning in the 1960's,  the new words soon found themselves married to the supposedly negative notion of political correctness. When activists used Ms. to symbolize and produce social change, the nation's alleged Rip Van Winkles ran the risk of being pilloried or ridiculed if they used fireman instead of firefighter, police officer instead of policeman. Over time, resisters deftly turned the tables by trivializing the call for change. New words meant nothing; in fact they translated into a supercilious demand conjured up by an overeducated elite.

    The result in 2010 is that added to the normal resistance to social change, is the potent charge of political correctness. Demand the use of new words and people often throw darts. We wind up spotlighting assumed arrogance rather than the crucial issues: The need for a transformation and a sociological fact,  no new words, no serious social change.

      The best way out of this Catch 22 is to do two things: Use sociology to trumpet the extraordinary power of words. And then ask people to change by being as empathetic as is humanly possible. Belligerence linked to embarrassment moves people to resist even the most obvious facts; am I supposed to say thank you for calling me a jerk or an asshole? Empathy is no panacea but it is a way to make it much easier for Americans to accept the need for radical social change.

       Begin with the power of words. They are always storehouses of cultural knowledge; they are generally internalized at the level of received wisdom; and they are always glued -simultaneously- to an emotional, an intellectual and an evaluative response. In addition, words are alive; as stimuli, they produce a response but that response is always mediated by a process of interpolation that deeply roots itself in cultural and personal experience.

     Take the word "nonwhite". Americans place everybody from Japanese to Pakistanis in this catch-all category and the word obviously includes an evaluative component. Indians or Koreans are missing something; they are neither black nor white so we make them a "non", a cultural  negative when compared to the enshrined ideal, white folks. The intellectual component includes America's preoccupation with skin color. We use an anemic, binary palette of black and white and are confused by people who challenge that model, e.g., Pakistanis who are much darker than many blacks. Over time American culture socially constructed the label nonwhite. It's absurd from a scientific perspective but intellectually adequate as long as we affirm our cultural inheritance and neglect facts. Finally, the emotional component often includes how I "feel" about nonwhites. If I embrace the culture, nonwhite can produce so much emotional heat that, as with the Chinese in the nineteenth century, we angrily exclude them because they are "utterly  incapable of assimilation".

    Vase was a traditional metaphor for the power of words. A more contemporary -and much better metaphor- is "tag words". Go Daddy wants them when any of us posts a blog; and they are responding to Google and other search engines who use the tags as "metadata", as information about information. Similarly, when I use the word "nonwhite" it instantly triggers preconscious information about, among other things, blacks, whites, race, prejudice and segregation. Like hitting return for the results of a Google or Bing search, words allow us to instantaneously process a mountain of cultural information and respond, at the level of taken for granted assumptions, according to the dictates of the culture.

   Because words channel cultural information so quickly, one marvelous way to produce change is to use new words. Like a car's backfire, new words produce, by definition, everything from curiosity to surprise to anxiety. Especially if they are "tag words" with endless ripple effects (e.g., Ms. or fusion) new words make interaction at best difficult because, instead of confirming preconscious knowledge, the new words deliberately defy the conventional wisdom. Hopefully the other party to the interaction asks you to explain yourself and both people begin to talk about the "information about information" loaded into important cultural words. Without a conversation, one side talks by the other since neither speaks the other's language.  

   Say that you call me nonwhite and I say I am a fusion. Or you call me white and I say I am a lovely shade of beige. Interaction is paralyzed until we move beyond the roadblock produced by the new words. My hope is that those of us interested in serious social change produce those roadblocks on an everyday basis; and that we use the women's movement as a role model.

   In the early sixties, a conjunction of factors allowed activists to seek to overturn endless centuries of sexism. Everything from books to demonstrations and "bra burning" caught people's attention but the real revolutionaries focused on language. They used Ms. to challenge the way men and women processed the culture's information about information. Ms. instantly told me that "you had your head in a different place" and that, unless I was implacably macho, I could no longer treat you in a traditional fashion.

  In 2010 millions of new immigrants offered us an unprecedented opportunity to challenge our most cherished assumptions about race and skin color. Among millions of others, Indians and Pakistanis and Iranians (who hail after all from Asia ) crash our operating system of "racial" beliefs. Many refuse to accept the absurdity of nonwhite status. Meanwhile, a December, 2009 study from the Pew Hispanic Center indicates "that a large majority of young Latinos (i.e., 16 to 25) do not see themselves fitting into the categories of race used by the U.S. Census Bureau." They temporarily define themselves using Census substitutions like  "some other race" or as Hispanic or Latino, a pan ethnic identity. Finally, many immigrants from the Caribbean (say Jamaicans) refuse to use skin color as an axis of personal and social identity. They have a culture; it's Jamaican and that's why they proudly use it for purposes of self identification.

     Thanks to immigrants, revolutionary potential exists from one end of the continent to the other. Imagine if we all got on the bandwagon and created, with new words like fusion, billions of roadblocks to interaction. Say we even argued that words like white, black and nonwhite are obscenities and that anyone who uses them echoes the thinking of the worst representatives of American culture, that is, slave traders and slave owners?