Yesterday's entry about the hurtfulness of lightly used -ist labels made me think of another instance. It was minor, but it shaped me.
When I first started teaching, I was a 26 year old T.A. One of the very first people to sit in my classroom was Bob, who was 75 if he was a day. It was awkward for me at first, presuming to teach someone three times my age, but Bob soon put me at ease by being utterly incapable. What he lacked in ability, however, he had in charm. He was a sweet, soft-spoken old guy, always forgetting that he'd told already us the story yesterday. We didn't care. We were all just running out the clock. The students and I all took to him as our sweet, daft old grandpa.
One day, the reading was about "sexist language." To his horror, Bob learned that his whole life, he'd been saying sexist things. It really upset him. By using the word "mankind" and the masculine generic third person ("When someone walks through the park, he should watch out for dogs."), as he and everyone else in the room had been taught to do, he was committing an ethical affront. Bob had no problem with using gender-neutral language, mind you. He was distraught over having been accused of perpetuating something so vile as sexism.
He stammered at length about how as a good liberal Democrat, he'd always supported equality in the workplace and culture. As the clock ticked off minute after excruciating minute during his pained, defensive soliloquy, soon we were all bitterly resenting the text's casual use of the s-word.
The moment stuck with me. It wasn't enough for the text to say merely "The rule you learned as a kid has changed. Use gender-neutral language." No, they got out their label-maker and got biz-ZAY. What good is being socially conscious, after all, if you can't smear society?