Word Assocations

[steepholm]

I've been trying to catch up with the TLS, and last night was taken with one their occasional "Then And Now" features. In this case it was reprinting an article first published in 1918 on the subject of "Jung and Word Association". It was an interesting piece altogether, but what leapt out at me was the following sentence:

The book also contains material of great value for comparing the average reactions of the uneducated with those of the mentally deficient; there are probably very many cases in which the defective represents, not the sins of his fathers or a freak of nature, but a failure of our present civilization to provide the educational opportunities that would give expression to the more unusual, and perhaps not the less valuable, types of mind.

I found it quite hard to process the fact that such un-PC language was being used to make what is, if one can press on to the end of the sentence, such an enlightened thought. To pick only the most obvious problem, was the writer really unaware of the problems involved in describing someone as a defective while also maintaining that their minds may be just as valuable as anyone else's? Did they really have such a tin ear? Or is it our own generation that, having thought so much about the ways in which privilege and prejudice are embedded in language, is unusually sensitive to such matters? (Or has our insensitivity simply moved to different spheres less visible to us, for future generations to hoot and tut at?)

Comments

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Thinking about it, the problem is perhaps more structural, in that the very fact that we feel the need to have a word to describe people who aren't white implies a specialness about whiteness that's not going to be erased by the choice of one term over another. Of course, many groups have words to describe people who aren't members of their own group (e.g. goy) but they tend to be used by the group themselves rather than as self-descriptors by the people to whom they're applied. Arguably it's a sign of white-normativity that people who aren't white feel the need to find a term to describe their own non-whiteness.

This comes out of a conversation with Lady_S last night in which I found myself asking what, say, a blind person, a person in a wheelchair and a person with bipolar have in common, apart from being expected to tick the 'Disabled' box on forms. Since their circumstances and the help they may require are all quite different, what is the point of grouping them under a general label, other than to reinforce the normative position of people without those conditions?

NB There may be very good answers to those questions, but I've not thought of them yet!