“I am deeply sorry and personally pledge to do better,” tweeted Darren Walker, the president of the Ford Foundation, one of the most important and well-funded philanthropic institutions in the world. The organization is endowed with some $12 billion to make the world better and uphold the values of its Center for Social Justice. Often it does great work, but standards are high for the righteous, and Walker had failed. Sit down before you read his confession, because the depth of his misdeed may shock you:
“In a recent interview, I used the term ‘tone deaf’ inappropriately & out of context from its literal definition. I am deeply sorry for using this ableist language & apologize to the millions of people with disabilities and the disability community. Since becoming the president of the Ford Foundation, we have committed to advancing justice and dignity for all people. Through this process, I have been on my own change journey to learn & understand more about the critical nature of justice and disability. We are taking steps to center disability in all of our programmatic work to address inequality, our operations & hiring practices, but this is not enough. My use of this phrase as a pejorative was insensitive & undermines our intent to advance disability justice & inclusion.”
With all due respect to Walker’s “change journey,” it is just impossible not to roll your eyes at this sort of thing. Tone deafness, in its “literal definition,” is simply not a disability, or at least not one that puts those of us who are tone-deaf in the “disability community.” The first known usage of “tone-deaf,” per Merriam-Webster, is from 1883, when it meant what it still means: “relatively insensitive to differences in musical pitch.” People who are tone-deaf aren’t hard of hearing; they just sing badly or like Coldplay. Try claiming disability benefits for that.
Surely, the president of a multi-multibillion-dollar organization could have somebody look this up for him before shamefacedly denouncing his word usage in public. But that’s not what the incentives are here. Lofty echelons of philanthropy and business and “thought leadership” don’t reward real thought about accurate usage. They reward evincing exquisite care about how words might hurt the feelings of oppressed groups while actually just making stuff up. The goal is to appear thoughtful, not really to be thoughtful, about language. Case in point: Walker’s Twitter bio states that “hope is the oxygen of democracy.” Anyone who thinks about the literal meaning of words will of course see that this faux-poetic buzzword mishmash is accidentally claiming hope is a necessary component for the combustion of democracy. You need hope to burn democracy. Nobody at the Ford Foundation reads closely enough to care.
What is particularly outrageous is that the “tone-deaf” thing Walker originally decried were some of the paintings of Philip Guston, a Jewish civil rights campaigner who mocked the Ku Klux Klan in depictions of hooded klansmen. The Ford Foundation decided it needed to pull funding because it deemed a retrospective of Guston’s work somehow racially “toxic.” Jason Farago correctly called this claim a calumny in the New York Times. Yet Walker’s profuse apology was for a fake claim about word usage, not for censorship and smearing an artist. Such is the atmosphere around well-funded social justice right now.
