Civic leaders and large institutions often use language to
color or misshape reality, thinking that through the use of words they can turn
chicken feathers into chicken salad. Most of the time, their attempts are
chicken shit, as the public has become wary of the various ways that
politicians and corporations distort reality. Most people laugh derisively when
a bank brags that 1.05% interest on a passbook account will help a family
accumulate assets for retirement. And people get suspicious when corporations
call a product recall a “quality withdrawal.”
But what if the organization or speaker deliver the lies not
with words and phrases, but baked into the relationship between the parts of
speech? Ellen Bresler Rockmore, a lecturer in rhetoric at Dartmouth presents a
truly odious example of using syntax and grammar to tell a lie in an article
titled “Texas
History Lesson” in The New York Times. Rockmore provides a complete analysis of the
following paragraph in a United States history book that Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt (HMH) publishes for Texas schools (I refuse to write, “for the Texas
school market”!):
Some slaves reported that their
masters treated them kindly. To protect their investment, some slaveholders
provided adequate food and clothing for their slaves. However, severe treatment
was very common. Whippings, brandings, and even worse torture were all part of
American slavery.
As Rockmore ably details, when talking about what the text
book is trying to present as the positive aspects of slavery, the sentences
have “subjects” like masters who do good things and “objects” such as slaves to
whom good stuff happens. Forget the fact that most of this good stuff never
occurred since life was brutish for most slaves most of the time. The writers
handle the “brutish” aspects in the second part of the paragraph, entirely without attribution. When it comes to whippings,
brandings and torture, which historians know occurred far more frequently than
kind treatment, we never learn who did it and to whom it was done. By draining
both the actor (subject) and the acted upon (object) from these sentences, the
writers make the actions abstract, almost dehumanized, which in this sense,
means devoid of human activity or intervention. Of course we know which human
beings did commit torture, whippings, brandings and other atrocities—it was the
slave owners.
Later in her very learned article, Rockmore gives an example
of the most common means by which writers use syntax and grammar to deform the
truth: the passive construction. Her
example, “Families were often broken
apart when a family member was sold to another owner” contains two passives:
“were broken apart” and “was sold.” If we replaced these parts of speech which
active versions of the verbs, the sentence might read, “Slave owners often
broke apart families by selling a family member to another slave owner.”
Removing the passive removes attribution and makes it seem as if the action of
breaking apart and selling are abstract and perhaps even natural processes.
FYI, conservative economists currently use the same approach when they blame
lower wages on the fact that “jobs in unionized older industries have been
replaced by jobs in newer non-unionized industries.”
Corporations will often use these inherently squeamish forms
of speech even when they are not talking about anything controversial. Lawyers
and accountants pretty much always write in the passive voice, as a means not
to attribute cause or action, and that predilection infected marketing
departments and the rest of corporate America decades ago.
I have made an excellent living for more than 25 years
advising clients on crisis communications issues, and in every case part of my
advice has been to turn some sentences written in the passive construction into
active voices: My staff routinely turns
sentences such as “The fight was broken up in five minutes” and “A dozen people
will be laid off” into the more direct, “Security broke up the fight quickly
with no one injured” and “We will lay off a dozen employees.” My theory is that by accepting blame, the
company will establish its credibility in fixing the problem and assuring the
public that everything is back to normal. By speaking directly, the company comes
off as open and honest, instead of projecting the deviousness and concealment
of the passive voice. Between crises and technocrats who want the public to
understand them (instead of “want to be understood”), we do a pretty good
business merely turning passive constructions into active ones.
When a corporation speaks in the passive voice and in other
ways use syntax and grammar to distort meaning, they do it almost always for
one of three reasons:
1.
Bad writers
2.
A desire to make something seem more abstract or
scientifically based
3.
To hide something bad.
In the case of the HMH writers of the Texas American history
book, we know they are good writers from the many finely-wrought sentences we
see in the text book. Why then, do they resort to these devious rhetorical
devices when talking about slavery?
We know the answer: They are cravenly putting money ahead of
integrity by giving into the desire of Texas school boards to whitewash
slavery.
But why do the Texas school boards want to whitewash
slavery? None of the people on the school boards nor any of their parents or
grandparents owned slaves. Slavery ended in 1865 (although a good case can be
made that the denial of civil and economic rights to blacks after the brief
Reconstruction era continued the spirit of slavery).
You don’t see positive references to Hitler or Nazism in the
German history textbooks. The Germans as a nation and a civil society accept
the horrifying fact that their ancestors participated in or condoned one of the
worst atrocities in recorded history. Virtually every town of any size in
Germany has a holocaust or a Jewish museum that reminds Germans of this
indelibly monstrous stain on German culture and history. Instead of trying to
hide the awful facts, Germans own up to their past and make sure everyone knows
that what they did was unforgiveable. It’s a good start for ensuring no
reoccurrence of the Nazi era.
What would be so wrong with Texas history books explicitly
admitting that slavery was an inhumane foundation for an economy and society?
Instead of trying to play down the worst excesses of slavery, Texans, other
southerners and the United States in general should admit how horrible slavery
was. The attitude of the text books should be “Yes we did bad stuff, and we
learned not to do it again.” Denying the full horror of slavery only serves to
justify it.
No comments:
Post a Comment