Roughly within the last 24 months, we have seen the term “diversity, equity, and inclusion” emerge as a replacement to simply “diversity and inclusion” training, which in turn replaced “transparent and pointless corporate liability butt-covering seminar.” Now, there’s been another development, as I read in an almost hilariously long and absurd article about “Why the Term ‘JEDI’ Is Problematic” in Scientific American: “The acronym ‘JEDI’ has become a popular term for branding academic committees and labeling STEMM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine) initiatives focused on social justice issues. Used in this context, JEDI stands for ‘justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion.’ In recent years, this acronym has been employed by a growing number of prominent institutions and organizations, including the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.”
The supposed problem is that JEDI evokes the good guys from Star Wars, and these fictional users of Light Side space magic are actually “eugenicist” and “exclusionary” members of a “cult.” Apparently, baby Yoda is a Nazi, according to America’s oldest magazine. “Although they’re ostensibly heroes within the Star Wars universe,” we are told, “the Jedi are inappropriate symbols for justice work. They are a religious order of intergalactic police-monks, prone to (white) saviorism and toxically masculine approaches to conflict resolution (violent duels with phallic lightsabers, gaslighting by means of ‘Jedi mind tricks,’ etc.).”
The Scientific American article, which has five co-authors, is a sort of exemplar nonpareil of what people mean when they talk derisively about wokeness: the combination of extreme moral stridency with childish cultural insights and a focus on top-down control of language instead of focusing on the material reality of human life. Star Wars nerds may write embarrassing stories about C3PO and Leia getting married or about a world where the author meets Darth Vader. This Scientific American article is somehow more embarrassing because it’s fan fiction for people who are fans of their own sense of moral superiority.
What makes me genuinely sad about the existence of an article like this, rather than just amused by the intellectual slapstick routine, is that I worry this kind of empty political grandstanding over language creates a way each side sounds that can code important things as worth ignoring or stupid things as worth taking seriously. I recently encountered a language project called “Decolonise Science,” and I started rolling my eyes at “decolonise” so hard I barely read on long enough to realize I was wrong to assume it was anything but an admirable and important effort. It aims to coin words for modern scientific concepts in African languages that don’t have them, bringing a huge number of people into communication with research science. The group “plans to translate 180 scientific papers” into a set of languages that are “collectively spoken by around 98 million people.” They’re solving a real, material problem here. “There’s no original isiZulu word for dinosaur. … And researchers and science communicators using the language, which is spoken by more than 14 million people in southern Africa, struggle to agree on words for evolution.” So, the “Decolonise Science” partners are suggesting words using lexical roots in the existing languages. One, South African Sibusiso Biyela, found that there is no isiZulu term for “fossil,” so he coined one: “amathambo amadala atholakala emhlabathini, or ‘old bones found in the ground.’” How cool is that? While America’s oldest magazine is lighting intellectual credibility on fire by making up fake problems in popular science communication, there are people out there doing the real linguistic work of making the world easier to understand and learn about.
