Sally Hemings was not Thomas Jefferson's enslaved person, because he personally did not enslave her. She was his slave, more specifically his sex slave. One of her grandmothers had been enslaved, and she head inherited slave status. The blunting of language, incidentally, comes also from people idea logically far removed from the Sierra Club, who would prefer to describe at grandmother as an "involuntary immigrant".
The language that claims to be more respectful is like you like the happy like all in fact the opposite, minimising the outrage committed on the victim (are we still allowed to say victim?) Recently, for example, I read of proposals to replace the word "homeless" with "unhoused", on the grounds that "homeless" confers a stigma. But that stigma lies, properly, not on the homeless but on the social order that left them in that position.
Sally Hemings was not Thomas Jefferson's enslaved person, because he personally did not enslave her. She was his slave, more specifically his sex slave. One of her grandmothers had been enslaved, and she head inherited slave status. The blunting of language, incidentally, comes also from people idea logically far removed from the Sierra Club, who would prefer to describe at grandmother as an "involuntary immigrant".
The language that claims to be more respectful is like you like the happy like all in fact the opposite, minimising the outrage committed on the victim (are we still allowed to say victim?) Recently, for example, I read of proposals to replace the word "homeless" with "unhoused", on the grounds that "homeless" confers a stigma. But that stigma lies, properly, not on the homeless but on the social order that left them in that position.
As for me, I am a half-deaf old Jew.