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terminologie | terminology

Peut-être avez-vous entendu récemment le mot Latinx, prononcé « latine-ex », et trouvé cette prononciation étonnante. L’espagnol est ma langue seconde, et bien que j’en connaisse les règles d’écriture, j’ai trouvé cela déconcertant les premières fois que j’ai entendu des anglophones militant pour des causes sociales ou s’exprimant dans des médias d’information prononcer la lettre « x » à la fin de ce mot plutôt que le son « inx ».

Comment récupérer l’esprit d’un mot dont l’utilisation normative par certains espaces théoriques et académiques aura tôt fait d’oblitérer les conditions matérielles qui le précèdent et le composent ? Voilà l’une des interrogations qui aura talonné nos réflexions autour du décolonial afin d’en réfléchir le mouvement délié de ses retranchements catégoriels : parvenir à penser ce terme à partir des contraintes langagières et métaphoriques que son usage peut reproduire, sans le déposséder des revendications plurielles desquelles il découle et avec lesquelles il lutte et s’inscrit.

It’s true that some people are simply anxious to keep up with the terminology to signal support for anti-racism, but when they do so without paying attention to the nuance of those terms, and flatten our identities and conflate the unique struggles of different groups, they replicate the problem the terminology is trying to eradicate.

This is a geographical ancestry term, which could have implications for genetics if used precisely. However, «Caucasian» today typically refers broadly to people coded as White by society, the majority of whom are actually not from the area of the Caucasus mountains. Additionally, classifying those coded as White by society as «Caucasian» is a throwback to the racist classification system defined by German anatomist Johann Blumenbach in the late 1700s.

It is high time we got rid of the word Caucasian. Some might protest that it is «only a label». But language is one of the most systematic, subtle, and significant vehicles for transmitting racial ideology. (…) Using the word Caucasian invokes scientific racism, the false idea that races are naturally occurring, biologically ranked subdivisions of the human species and that Caucasians are the superior race.

Including the invention of «Caucasian» as the name of white people makes good sense in a conference dedicated to collective degradation, for the still current ter «Caucasian» connects directly to collective degradation, in the form of the gendered, eastern slave trade, via the network of learned societies that so deeply influenced the history of science in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Before this essay turns to Göttingen in 1795 and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1762-1840), who is known for having invented the association, let me locate the Caucasus and its peoples.

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