How the word ‘we’ can be both inclusive and exclusive
Unfortunate choice of language can divide people, alienate minorities
On the Internet last weekend, an Australian video went viral, as they say, attracting hundreds of thousands of viewers within a few days. The video was a “blind trust experiment,” one whose subjects choose to put themselves at the public’s mercy. It featured Jasirah, a teenaged Aboriginal girl from a remote village in Western Australia, standing on a popular beach in the city of Perth. She had a blindfold over her eyes and a handwritten sign by her feet: “I trust you. Do you trust me? Let’s hug.” Polls have indicated that only a small percentage of mainstream Australians say they trust Aboriginals. Would Jasirah’s courage be repaid with scorn?
It would not. The video offers heartwarming proof of random warmth. Australians of both sexes and all ages came up to Jasirah and gave her a hug. Her action, incidentally, was based on a similar performance in downtown Toronto in January, in which a young man stood beside a sign declaring he was Muslim and asking if strangers were prepared to hug him; that video, too, has been seen worldwide.
Why, you may be wondering, are you reading about all this in a language column? The answer involves the headline that alerted me to the new video’s existence — one that appeared on the front page of the BBC News website, one of the most widely read news sites in the English-speaking world. The headline was this: “Can a hug help people trust Aboriginals?”
That’s unacceptable. I would even say it’s outrageous. It creates a distinction between two categories: “Aboriginals” and “people.” While the article describes human beings coming together, regardless of their skin colour, and embracing on the crowded sand, the headline evokes a different picture: one of division. The BBC’s selection of words reinforces the rupture that Jasirah and the video-makers were attempting to heal.
That kind of rhetoric — even if it’s inadvertent — has a long and painful history. A century ago, the American photographer Edward Curtis became renowned for his elegiac portraits of aboriginal people on this continent. Writing in Scribner’s magazine in 1906, Curtis set out to tell his readers that American Indians were being viciously mistreated. But the language he chose was unfortunate: “The relationship of the Indians and the people of this country is that of a child and parent. We will stand convicted for all time as a parent who failed in his duty.” Fair enough — except that in his use of the word “people,” Curtis excluded Indians.
Even those who belong to minority communities sometimes fall into this verbal trap. In 2009, for instance, Maclean’s magazine ran a story about the surprisingly negative attitudes held by Canadians — especially those in Quebec — toward the adherents of minority faiths. The article quoted Ihsaan Gardee, executive director of the Council on Islamic-American Relations Canada (it has now been renamed the National Council of Canadian Muslims), as saying: “The more that people have interactions with Muslims, the more favourable an opinion they have of Muslims.” I realize that Gardee was commenting about “people” in a loose sense, but I still think his choice of words was rhetorically unwise.
Journalists and politicians have a special responsibility to make sure that the words they publish don’t split readers into two groups: insiders and outsiders. Their use of the pronoun “we” is crucial in this respect. It’s an ambiguous little word, one that can exclude as well as include. Think of Parti Québécois leadership candidate Pierre Karl Péladeau, who recently told students in Quebec City: “We won’t have 25 years ahead of us to realize sovereignty. With demographics, with immigration, it’s clear we lose a riding each year. We would like to have better control.”
Péladeau’s “we” — in the original French, he used both “on” and “nous” — was clearly exclusive rather than inclusive. It was the verbal equivalent of a hug offered not to all the people of Quebec but only to a single group. It was certainly not designed to create trust.