On June 5, 2020, the Twitter account for Fruit Gushers, the little packets of candy that are like diabetes-inducing ravioli, posted as follows: “Gushers wouldn’t be Gushers without the Black community and your voices. We’re working with @fruitbythefoot on creating space to amplify that. We see you. We stand with you.” Fruit By the Foot retweeted it, writing: “Teaming up with @gushers. We are listening & committed for the long term. Stay tuned.”
Well, I have stayed tuned, and it is a shame to see that Gushers and Fruit By the Foot have not been successful at ending racist violence using their strategy of vague buzzwords, such as “spaces” and “voices” and “standing with.” What’s worth mocking here, specifically, is the idea that using mere rhetoric actually is helping rather than just posturing. Prosecutors who worked on the Derek Chauvin trial helped. People who do boring work giving out food and education so it sucks less to be poor and is easier to get out of poverty help. Good police officers help. “Standing with communities” and “creating space” to “amplify voices?” That just makes you sound like you went to a liberal arts school and know how to chant at a protest, but not how to distinguish between improvements in actual material conditions. You are merely spreading social justice slogans to places such as, well, social media marketing specialists at the Gushers branding office.
The Gushers tweet now stands as a historical artifact — a relic of a moment when it must have seemed impossible not to send a tweet that today, only two years on, looks completely absurd. These tweets were the symptoms of a moral panic in which nobody could be concerned enough. There were no such things as appropriately concerned and overconcerned about police killings in June 2020, only underconcerned, because people were thinking in groups. A herd of gazelles can’t run from a lion at just the right pace or too quickly, only too slowly.
I dredge all of this up not just to gawk at Gushers’s incredible tweet, but to suggest that our own moment’s moral obsessions, however gripping, shall pass too. We have seen cycles of panic, with 2018 being “a year when issues of gender and sexuality dominated the national conversation” with #MeToo, 2020 being all about police violence against black people, and our own year’s fights primarily concerned with gender identity, i.e., transgender issues. Since June 2020, Merriam-Webster has updated its definition of the word “woman.” It keeps “of, relating to, or being the sex that typically has the capacity to bear young or produce eggs” as a primary definition. The secondary definition has changed, though, and not for the better. It used to be “made up of usually adult members of the female sex.” Now, it is “having a gender identity that is the opposite of male.”
This is not a five-alarm fire. You can continue to get the concept from the dictionary. But it’s troubling to see this institution, whose raison d’etre is to explain words, change a definition in a way that removes clarity rather than adds it. Meanwhile, according to Sky News, real-life players of Quidditch, the sport from the fictional world of Harry Potter, are changing the name of the game to “Quadball” to “distance themselves” from author J.K. Rowling over her alleged transphobia. Wouldn’t want adults to look bad while running around with a broomstick between their legs playing a game from a children’s book!
The dictionary should not be defining words in terms of their opposites, which is an elision and bad lexicography. But just remember, in 2020, the details of 2018’s panics already seemed either quaint or insane, and in 2022, that’s true of 2020.
