I know people have raised various good objections to the kind of signaling games that involve constantly shifting shibboleths, like the way they assign moral value to adherence to a confusing set of language norms rather than like, doing morally good things.
As someone with finite amounts of time and energy for actually being an ally to oppressed groups but high verbal intelligence and a high tolerance for following the Discourse closely I think they’re great.
But apparently my sister’s middle school teacher has told them that they’re not allowed to use the word “black” to describe people? They have to use “person of color.” Except … “person of color” is an umbrella term for all nonwhite people … so there is literally no way they can specifically refer to black people? They just end up with a lot of sentences in their essays like “After they were freed from slavery, many people of color made a living as sharecroppers” which … isn’t untrue I guess?
(The teacher is white and most of the students are white or Asian. I wonder how the black students feel about this policy.)