The Hyperstitious Slur Cascade

Someone asks: why is “Jap” a slur? It’s the natural shortening of “Japanese person”, just as “Brit” is the natural shortening of “British person”. Nobody says “Brit” is a slur. Why should “Jap” be?

My understanding: originally it wasn’t a slur. Like any other word, you would use the long form (“Japanese person”) in dry formal language, and the short form (“Jap”) in informal or emotionally charged language. During World War II, there was a lot of informal emotionally charged language about Japanese people, mostly negative. The symmetry broke. Maybe “Japanese person” was used 60-40 positive vs. negative, and “Jap” was used 40-60. This isn’t enough to make a slur, but it’s enough to make a vague connotation. When people wanted to speak positively about the group, they used the slightly-more-positive-sounding “Japanese people”; when they wanted to speak negatively, they used the slightly-more-negative-sounding “Jap”.

At some point, someone must have commented on this explicitly: “Consider not using the word ‘Jap’, it makes you sound hostile”. Then anyone who didn’t want to sound hostile to the Japanese avoided it, and anyone who did want to sound hostile to the Japanese used it more. We started with perfect symmetry: both forms were 50-50 positive negative. Some chance events gave it slight asymmetry: maybe one form was 60-40 negative. Once someone said “That’s a slur, don’t use it”, the symmetry collapsed completely and it became 95-5 or something. Wikipedia gives the history of how the last few holdouts were mopped up. There was some road in Texas named “Jap Road” in 1905 after a beloved local Japanese community member: people protested that now the word was a slur, demanded it get changed, Texas resisted for a while, and eventually they gave in. Now it is surely 99-1, or 99.9-0.1, or something similar. Nobody ever uses the word “Jap” unless they are either extremely ignorant, or they are deliberately setting out to offend Japanese people.

This is a very stable situation. The original reason for concern - World War II - is long since over. Japanese people are well-represented in all areas of life. Perhaps if there were a Language Czar, he could declare that the reasons for forbidding the word “Jap” are long since over, and we can go back to having convenient short forms of things. But there is no such Czar. What actually happens is that three or four unrepentant racists still deliberately use the word “Jap” in their quest to offend people, and if anyone else uses it, everyone else takes it as a signal that they are an unrepentant racist. Any Japanese person who heard you say it would correctly feel unsafe. So nobody will say it, and they are correct not to do so. Like I said, a stable situation.

II.

This story shows that slurs are hyperstitions.

A hyperstition is a belief which becomes true if people believe it’s true. For example, “Dogecoin is a great short-term investment and you need to buy it right now!” is true if everyone believes it is true; lots of people will buy Dogecoin and it will go way up. “The bank is collapsing and you need to get your money out right away” is likewise true; if everyone believes it, there will be a run on the bank. (...)

Slurs are like this too. Fifty years ago, “Negro” was the respectable, scholarly term for black people, used by everyone from white academics to Malcolm X to Martin Luther King. In 1966, Black Panther leader Stokely Carmichael said that white people had invented the term “Negro” as a descriptor, so people of African descent needed a new term they could be proud of, and he was choosing “black” because it sounded scary. All the pro-civil-rights white people loved this and used the new word to signal their support for civil rights, soon using “Negro” actively became a sign that you didn’t support civil rights, and now it’s a slur and society demands that politicians resign if they use it. Carmichael said - in a completely made up way that nobody had been thinking of before him - that “Negro” was a slur - and because people believed him it became true.

In 2019, I wrote a post about respectability cascades, where some previously taboo thing (like being openly gay) gets more respectable people to sign on to it, making it less taboo and paving the way for even more respectable people, and so on. Hyperstitious slurs are the opposite of this, a sort of disrespectability cascade.

III.

Things other than words can also be hyperstitious slurs.

“All lives matter” is a hyperstitious slur. Taken literally, it’s an inoffensive sentiment, perhaps the most inoffensive one. My impression is that for the first week of its existence, it was mostly meant inoffensively, used by nice elderly people who thought it was a friendly amendment to the Black Lives Matter slogan. But once the media successfully convinced everyone that it was a racist attempt to erase black lives in particular, and that people would scream at you if you used it, then the only people who kept using it were ones who cared so little about BLM’s opinion that they didn’t mind - maybe welcomed - being screamed at. I think use of All Lives Matter had very low - maybe 51-49 - correlation with political opinion the first week it was in use. Now it’s probably 99-1.

Images can be hyperstitious slurs. (...)

Actions can be hyperstitious slurs; (...)

True facts can be hyperstitious slurs. (...)

Entire ways of life can be hyperstitious slurs. (...)

IV.

Okay, but this process is bad, right?

Suppose someone decides tomorrow that “Asian” is a slur, and demands we call them “person of Asian descent”. Everyone agrees to go along with this for some reason, and fine, “Asian” is now a slur.

This seems bad for everybody. White people have to be on tenterhooks every time they talk to an Asian, trying their hardest to restrain from using the word they’re familiar with, and to remember the unwieldy gibberish that replaces it. If they fail, they have to feel bad, or worry that the local Asian community thinks they’re a racist. Meanwhile, Asians now have to police everyone else’s behavior, saying “Actually, that word is offensive, we prefer ‘person of Asian descent’ every time someone refers to them. When people get annoyed by this, they have to fret that the person is actually racist against them and trying to deliberately offend them. If they are the sort of person who is triggered by hearing slurs, they will have to be triggered several times a day as people adjust from the familiar language to the new. Meanwhile, dozens of organizations with names like the National Asian Alliance, Asian Community Center, or Asians For Biden will have to change their names. Old novels will need to include forewords apologizing for how in the old days people used to use insensitive terms, and we’re sorry we’re making you read a book with the word A***n in it. Some old people will refuse to change and get ostracized by society. This is just a bad time time on all sides.

The only excuse for it is that it’s actually preventing someone from feeling sad or getting offended. I think in the 1950s there really were a lot of Japanese people who felt triggered by the word “Japs”, and society going through an inconvenient transition in order to protect and show respect for those people was a reasonable move.

Still, people keep trying to turn new things into slurs for dumb reasons. (...)

V.

So one thing I think about a lot is: when do I join the cascade?

I can’t never join the cascade.

by Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Well, this hit a nerve (in the Comments section anyway - 1230+ eg. "this also goes in the other direction, where a group reclaims what was once a slur and turns it into a term of empowerment (e.g. “queer”, “dyke marches”, etc"). I'm not sure where hyperstitious slurs intersect with "wokeness" (70 percent is arbitrary, and the concept itself seems broader - not just words but internalized "feelings"), but for what it's worth, see also: The Right’s Obsession With Wokeness Is a Sign of Weakness (NYT); and, The ‘Great Awokening’ Is Winding Down (Musa al-Gharbi).]