Labelmaker

As the old saying goes, “sticks and stones may break my bones but single words may completely alter the course of my feelings about people groups.” —Or do I have that wrong?…

I have recently been spending time in Butte County, CA (beautiful!) interviewing many members of the community and developing a campaign which will promote healthy lifestyles throughout the populace.

During my conversations, I became aware of “Ishi,” the last known member of the Yahi tribe, who walked out of the wilderness into Oroville in 1911. Ishi was a name given to him by anthropology professors from UC Berkeley and UCSF who spent the last five years of his life studying him. According to the customs of his tribe “Ishi” could not speak his own name until formally introduced by another member of his own tribe. As he put it, “I have no name because there were no people to name me.” Sadly, he died after only five years, in what was probably his mid-fifties, because he had not acquired immunity to common diseases.

Ishi was able to give anthropologists great insight into the language and customs of his tribe and was the last living person who knew how to make the stone arrowheads that his tribe affixed to their arrows. The conversation around this I find particularly interesting.

In 1996, theories were advanced that the particular style of arrowheads that Ishi made were styles from the Nomlaki or Wintu tribes and that Ishi was more likely raised by people from those tribes. I find the casualness in suggesting that an American Indian knew less about which tribe he belonged to than an anthropologist studying him 80 years later and basing it on arrowheads alone to be startlingly dismissive. It’s akin to someone 80 years from now finding my Le Creuset cookware and deciding that I was wrong in calling myself British (American) and must have in fact been French.

Similarly, a new book on Sacagawea, written by elders of her actual tribe, Hidatsa, (not the tribe that Lewis and Clarke said she belonged to) presents compelling evidence (including DNA) that the written history of her is incorrect and that the tribal history, passed down, is accurate — including that she lived into her 80’s. It makes me recall the accusations of libel and more that accompanied the initial conversations of Thomas Jefferson’s relations with Sally Hemmings — only to be proven accurate later by DNA. It essentially boiled down to, “these things can’t be true, the passed down memories of black slaves cannot be comparable to the written words of white people.”

These kinds of Western biases are built in all across our perceptions. I’ve recently been looking at the “method of loci,” (AKA “memory palace”) a long-used method of remembering vast amounts of text and knowledge. Similar tools using verse, rhythm, dance and visuals have been used for many thousands of years by cultures to pass down knowledge. Even today, there are millions of Hafiz that know and can recite all 77,430 words of the Qur’an. This tradition goes back over 1,400 years. However, it is not just religious knowledge but histories that have been passed down this way for millennia. When western cultures sniff at other cultures that did not have written history, there is an immediate rush to judgement that their histories are inaccurate because they are/were not written. However, this is much more a reflection on the weak, social media-addled modern western brain than the accuracy of ancient mnemonic memorializing tools. Brain scans of people who use the method of loci to enter memory competitions show their brains grow like a powerlifter’s muscles due to training. And the rhythmic, repetitive nature of such learning methodology coupled with tribal-level correction systems (similar to Wikipedia) has long ensured unparalleled levels of accuracy.

Government See, Government Do

But telling people that they don’t know who they are or that their brains are inferior shows itself in many ways. Many or most of them quite unintentionally.

I often point out something that sounds, on the face of it, to be patently obvious: Public Health messaging takes place in public. As I always go on to explain, outward facing messaging is not just seen by the intended audience, it is usually seen by a broad swath of the public. And this is where problems can arise. One of the foundational tenets of The Relational Intersect is that much conversation does not take place at the level of “what I think of you and what you think of me,” but gets complicated and warped by “what I think you think of me and what you think I think of you.” If you imagine I see you as the enemy, regardless of what I actually think, you will be on the defensive and looking for cues to prove your theory correct. Cues that may have completely innocent realities.

When people see public health messages directed at them, they are very aware that others can see them also and it can trigger concern of how other people in the community now think about them. —Whether these concerns are valid or not, they are very real to the person having them.

So, it is important to remember when creating these messages that, when done best, messaging is serving several purposes.

1. The obvious one: communicating the message at hand.
2. Talking to the target audience in a way that feels respectful to them.
3. Talking to the target audience in such a way that they don’t imagine that others seeing the message will harbor negative feelings toward them.
4. Talking to the target audience in such a way that avoids others seeing the message actually ending up with negative feelings toward them.

In my experience, items 3 & 4 are rarely considered. Yet they are the areas most fraught with pitfalls. No-one in public health sets out to create stigma, but if, in your messaging, you are not spending time considering those two areas it is very possible that it will happen.

As is the case with so many things, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Just as Ishi’s own tribal knowledge was discounted in favor of an outsider’s assumptions, today we sometimes dismiss how people actually describe themselves, replacing it with what officials believe is the “correct” terminology. Or we default to very government sounding language that can create reflexive oppositionality in those large swaths of the population that are not the target audience but are, nonetheless observing. With a bit more thought, we can create more friends and less enemies for the people we serve.

Feelings Are Real to the Person Feeling Them

Recently I interviewed a Paralympian who uses a wheelchair. When I heard her refer to herself as disabled, I took a few minutes to focus on that. Many proponents of “person-first language,” which is considered pro forma in government communications circles, (again, with all good intent) would avoid writing or saying “disabled” and instead say or write, “person with a disability.” The theory is that saying it this way indicates that the person is much more than the disability. —Except that most disability advocates don’t feel that way. They feel that their disability is central to their identity, not something to be shied away from. Similarly, homeless people largely refer to themselves as homeless, not “person experiencing homelessness” (Or person experiencing unshelteredness, etc.)

Many advocates think that when you sanitize the language of people’s challenges, you sanitize their experience, and that doing so is not respect, it is avoidance. —Whether true or not to the speaker, if it feels like that to the target audience, then it is real to them.

Something I make a point to say when giving talks on the Relational Intersect is that the people you communicate with need to feel the love in your heart. I always preface this as sounding rather corny, but it is nonetheless true. The idea that one word controls the trajectory of a sentence or conversation is a very simplistic view that is often sold as a simple, check-a-box answer, but it is important to realize that it does not actually sit on much in the way of solid evidence.

The closest thing to a real study of this was from 2010 by Kelly & Westerhoff. It is a paper that, to me, reads less like a study than a conclusion that went looking for evidence. The researchers compared the potential stigmatizing effects of, “people with a substance use disorder” to “drug abuser”. “Drug abuser,” I would posit, is an even more inflammatory term than “drug addict.” The word, addict, insinuates that the person in is the thrall and grasp of something more powerful than themselves, whereas the word abuser, insinuates dark, purposeful intent. Using a study that compares those two phrases and extrapolating that broadly as a proof of the efficacy of person-first language is close to the logic that Purdue Pharma used when making a small very specific study about drug tolerance when in pain as the underpinning of hooking America on opioids. (In the Kelly & Westerhoff, the stigma effect was very small in one area and zero in two others.)

As Steven Pinker said in The Language Instinct, “People invent new terms for stigmatized conditions, but the euphemism eventually becomes tainted itself.” —The reason for this is that tone and content control perception way beyond the scope of any particular word. If you feel good or bad about a particular group, that won’t change because you hear them called a different name. Changing perceptions can be difficult and requires more expertise. But people too often want a shortcut…

Additionally, a study by Byrne & Hart in 2009 concluded that overly moralistic or jargon-heavy language reduced engagement and credibility — especially when coming from an authority figure. Telling large groups that the way they refer to a class of person, is wrong, no matter what is in their heart, is akin to the people that correct other people’s grammar in comment sections. No surprise, people don’t like it. And they don’t like the people that do it to them.  

If we are looking to change what is in people’s hearts about those who are homeless, trans, disabled, etc., then the way we talk about them (and, perhaps more importantly, the way we treat them) is what will create that change — not single-word nomenclature and the associated correction and even cancellation of failing to use today’s approved terminology. Too many allies or potential allies feel like they are having their commitment questioned in this way, and communications that otherwise might gain traction can be dragged down by a punctilious adherence to jargon and (to the listener) strange sounding terminology that, to them, drips with condescension.

Importantly, I am not saying that there is no place for “person with cancer,” “person with schizophrenia” or even “person without housing,” but imagining that this is a light switch between good and bad communications and over-applying it resulting in communications that end up disjointed, unwieldy and unread, helps no-one — and may turn a good many off. It is the narrative arc that tells the story and can move the perceptive needle best. If we pay attention to one, we must pay attention to the other.

Referring back to points 2 & 3 above. If we want the people we serve to feel that they are being presented in the best light — and we want to ensure that that is actually the case,we need to ask ourselves, “how would a person that is not currently our ally hear this message and is there a way I can draw them in also?”  

When done correctly, it is a gift for those we serve and the community at large.