We Do Not Need To Explain or Justify Language Difference
This article is a response to the question “Numerous activist collectives and authors have put forth maintenance and care as the only viable alternatives to both exploitation and boundlessly wasteful consumerism. What would maintenance and care look like for antifascist language(s)? What forms of sociality and human contact, what institutions, and what technologies (if any) would they require?”
I wrote this in tandem with my presentation for Dartmouth’s Antifascist Language in Multilingual Societies: A Virtual Symposium held by Political Lang.
In the fourth grade, I had a teacher who would confiscate student items if she thought they were distracting. In response, my friends and I wrote a mock “Declaration of Independence,” where, in the end, we stated our right to have our stuff. When the teacher read it, she said we lost her at the word “stuff,” and we should have picked a more interesting and professional word. She refused to listen to our grievances as if that one word nullified the entire document. But, can you really justify holding onto a child’s slap bracelet just because they didn’t use the word “belongings?”
Since I was young, I was told that people wouldn’t respect me if I talked a certain way. At both school and home, I had my speech policed until it was perfect, like many of us do as…