A liberal college in Massachusetts has gone too far with its “Oppressive Language List” as a push for inclusivity.
Brandeis University located outside of Boston in Waltham, Massachusetts has ban words for both students and faculty, including “picnic,” because they are offensive.
According to the college, “picnic is often associated with lynchings of black people in the United States, during which white spectators were said to have watched while eating, referring to them as picnics or other terms involving racial slurs against black people.”
The private university is urging its students and faculty to stop using certain words and phrases and the list is absolutely crazy. The list is so crazy, in fact, that the word ‘crazy’ is one of the words the university is trying to delete from its language.
The list of words and phrases is on its official website via its Prevention, Advocacy, and Resource Center (PARC). A campus counseling service has deemed these certain words and phrases links to violence and power to “reinforce systems of oppression.”
“As a community, we can strive to remove language that may hurt those who have experienced violence from our everyday use,” the PARC says.
The phrase “Rule of thumb” has a different but oppressive history connected with it. The word allegedly evolved from an old British law, that allowed men to beat their wives, but only with sticks not wider than their thumb. The alternative for the phrase suggested by PARC is “general rule”.
Additionally, the term “trigger warning” was listed because the word “trigger” is connected to guns, so the university recommends the usage of a less violent alternative.
“PARC recognizes that language is a powerful tool used to perpetuate and perpetuate oppression. As a community, we strive to remove oppressive language from our everyday use. This list is meant to be a tool to share information and suggestions about potentially oppressive language.”
According to AWM, phrases that were considered controversial include “killing it” and “taking a shot at” or “taking a stab at.” The school suggested alternatives like “great job” or “awesome” for “killing it.” While students and faculty are expected to say “give it a go” or “try” instead of the other two “violent” examples.
Another offensive phrase, “go off the reservation,” was deemed problematic because “this phrase has a harmful history rooted in the violent removal of indigenous people from their land and the horrible consequences for someone that left the reservation.”
However, the list was not met with enthusiasm by all, as GOP Representative Elise Stefanik branded the list as “an all-out assault on our First Amendment”.
She also added that it was an instance of Leftist cancel culture in the academia, stating, “The Far Left’s radical overhaul of education is un-American. They push so-called ‘safe spaces’ to eliminate diversity of thought, critical thinking, and intellectual curiosity and replace it with Socialist brainwashing, groupthink, and Marxist ideology like Critical Race Theory.”
Source: AWM
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