Refugees?

[fellow_traveler]

Many progressive commentators of color have recently condemned the use of the term "refugee" to describe New Orleanians who have been forced to flee their homes. Most of the objections I've heard have been in Pacifica webcasts*, so I can't really link to them at the moment. However, I'm not shitting you; people really have complained, and it's

Comments

[daerr]

I point your towards this blog post by Geoff Nunberg on the Language log.

[theguiterrorist]

The biggest complaint about the use of "refugee" from viewers at the newsroom I work in had more to do with the fact that it was being used alongside video of black people, while it wasn't so much with whites.

Ultimately, the complaint is not about the concrete definition so much as it is who it applies to. "Refugee" has a connotation that ties in too well to "black and poor."

I will grant you that there has been a tone to some of the ocmments that is more along the lines of "they're not refugees because they don't live in the Third World."

My producer decided about three days in that it was better to call them "people."

[xamses]

It reminds me of our labelling our opponents in Iraq "insurgents," when a pretty small minority of them are from out-of-country. Obviously language can be used to evoke different responses in the masses. The refugee term seems to imply desperation and victimization in the way it's being used now (and it's doubly powerful because this is the US, a place that isn't supposed to have refugees), but some people take an extremely prescriptivist view of language and turn to the dictionary as the final arbiter.

"Victims" sounds extremely patronizing in the long term and "evacuees" implies that there's something to return home to.