Last week, the University of Tennessee Volunteers lost a football game to Ole Miss. Trying to puzzle out what happened is, for this decidedly disinterested Memphian anyway, something of a challenge, but I gather that there was a call by the referee that some UT fans found objectionable. So, like any sane adults attempting to voice their ire, they threw trash onto the field of Neyland Stadium. The Vols, incidentally, were playing at home, so these fans were mucking up their own turf. I suppose it is worth remembering that “fan” is short for “fanatic.”
Still, how the citizens of Knoxville choose to conduct themselves in public is no real concern of mine, living, as I do, almost 400 miles away. But I have noticed a disturbing trend in the way the event has been discussed. I don’t recall the first instance, but I’ve seen the trash-dumping described as a “protest.” Language is flexible, but that’s stretching the definition of “protest” to the absolute breaking point.
It’s not lost on me that some of the same people who are comfortable describing last Saturday’s food fight in that forgiving way probably used harsher language to describe, to stick with sports-adjacent examples, former 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s protest of police violence against Black Americans. I’m sure one of the two was deemed “disrespectful,” and I doubt it was the display that endangered players and left a field covered in trash. So yes, racism surely plays a part in the language we use to describe these events.
This has been on my mind to discuss for some time. I’m reminded every time I see people blocking hospital entrances or assaulting doctors and nurses leaving work or intimidating school board meetings described as “protesters.” Let’s call them what they are — terrorists. Their aim is to, by means of intimidation and threats of violence, achieve their political goals. I have, for close to two years now, endeavored to maintain some level of sympathy for people who fear that vaccines and masks might hurt them. I think those claims are easily disproved, but I also understand that the disinformation machine is chugging along at full power.
When we repeat these euphemisms, we uncritically accept — and help spread — a narrative that obfuscates the truth with an emotional appeal. It almost always helps people already in power and hurts people already hurting.
When, fresh out of college, I worked as a clerk and then a paralegal at a law firm, supervising workers compensation cases, I heard the phrase “right to work” fairly often. It sounds noble, but in reality, legal bans on union security contracts between labor unions and employers tend to weaken the bargaining power of the worker. Similarly, when Mississippi’s workers compensation statutes changed, I often found myself explaining to our clients that their bodies were now, according to the state of Mississippi, worth fewer weeks of total benefits. It was never an easy conversation to have; these people almost all had kids to feed. Often we had done everything within our power, achieved the best settlement available under the law, but it seemed a pittance when considered against the loss the worker suffered, the radically altered future they now faced. When I discussed how best to communicate the legal limits of our power with the attorney I worked for, he eventually got frustrated and quipped, “Tell them the ‘family values’ politicians they voted for wrote laws that hurt their families.”
Look, it’s one of the most bedrock principles of any fairy-tale — names have power. To put it another way, we’re living in the country that has elected one movie star president and one reality TV star president. As many people watch the Super Bowl for the ads as the game. Image consultant is a real job.
In other words, as tennis player Andre Agassi said in a 1989 Lamborghini ad, “Image is everything.” Let us not do the work of bad actors for them. Remember the power of names.