Why Grammarly’s New Suggestions for Writing About Slavery Were Always Going to Miss the Mark

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From Slate:

“Twitter is an ok place to be a little annoyed, right?” asked historian of slavery Elise A. Mitchell in January. She then reported in a thread that Grammarly, the freemium writing-assistant app very familiar to consumers of YouTube videos, had started to suggest changes in language around slavery. If a person were to type the word slave, Grammarly would now suggest the replacement enslaved person. The phrases fugitive slave and runaway slave now triggered the suggested replacement freedom seeker. If you were to write slaveowner or master (in places where the context indicates you’re talking about slavery), the app would suggest enslaver instead. The use of master or slave in nonslavery contexts (as sometimes occurs in engineering, or when describing that one big, fancy bedroom in a house) provokes a suggestion to consider an alternate. “I’m wary (and weary) of who gets to be an authority over the language we use to talk about our past,” Mitchell wrote.

These suggestions appeared in the app as of Jan. 18, Grammarly spokesperson Senka Hadzimuratovic confirmed to me in an email. Asked how Grammarly decided to add “suggestions” about slavery, Hadzimuratovic wrote: “We prioritized these particular suggestions based on a combination of the curiosity of our users for these topics as ascertained through user research, the prevalence of the language in question in writing, and the potential hurt the language can cause.” (Hadzimuratovic added that the company included “subject matter experts on race and ethnicity” in its research process; I asked to speak to one, and she declined, citing nondisclosure agreements signed when the experts agreed to work with the company.)

Hadzimuratovic also sent me a list of 11 resources the company had used when researching these changes: guides produced by organizations like the Underground Railroad Education Center, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Teaching Tolerance project, and the NAACP. The suggestions Grammarly provided are, so to speak, in the air—you can find support for every one of them in these resources. So why did the many historians of slavery who replied to Mitchell’s thread agree that the company had misstepped?

This is what happens when experts in a complicated subject matter see their work translated into normative prescriptions. First, on freedom seeker. As Mitchell pointed out in her tweets, “Not everyone who fled was seeking ‘freedom,’ ” and “running away is not the only way to ‘seek freedom.’ ” There is a growing body of academic work on how some enslaved people in the United States who could not run away altogether for whatever reason stayed and “sought freedom” in other ways: negotiation, temporary absences, smaller (and less permanent and risky) acts of resistance. (Historian Daina Ramey Berry wrote about enslaved people’s negotiations around freedom here, in an essay referring to, and synthesizing, some of this work.)

Enslaver as a substitute for slave owner doesn’t quite work, either. Sometimes enslavers didn’t themselves own people. Scholar Nicholas Rinehart wrote a piece about slavery and language for the online journal Commonplace, which he linked in a reply to Mitchell. In it, he has a list of the different roles that could fall into the bucket enslaver:

Merchants who purchased and sold slaves; ship captains and crew who held them captive; auctioneers who ran slave markets; slave traders who acted on behalf of wealthy planters; overseers on plantations throughout the Americas; managers who ran plantations for absentee estate holders; banks and firms that financed those plantations; institutions and other corporate bodies that owned slaves; and more.

With so many specific roles falling into the enslaver category, an automatic correction in this language—whether executed by habit or by software—might make everything about the history you’re describing less precise. And since one of the major lessons historians of slavery try to emphasize is that the institution could be found woven into every part of the economy and society, the loss of specificity could be significant.

Additional issues arise when you consider the word enslaver in a global context. In replies to Mitchell’s thread, historians specializing in slavery in Africa, indigenous North America, and South America added that enslavers and slave owners were two different groups in these contexts. “People were enslaved so that they could be sold, not owned” in Africa during the time of the slave trade, tweeted Rebecca Shumway. “To conflate [enslavers and slaveowners] would make the history unintelligible.” “That distinction is critical to understanding indigenous North American forms of slavery, too,” added Brett Rushforth. “One can’t understand the Jesuits in Brazil without it,” Andrew Dial said.

Additional issues arise when you consider the word enslaver in a global context. In replies to Mitchell’s thread, historians specializing in slavery in Africa, indigenous North America, and South America added that enslavers and slave owners were two different groups in these contexts. “People were enslaved so that they could be sold, not owned” in Africa during the time of the slave trade, tweeted Rebecca Shumway. “To conflate [enslavers and slaveowners] would make the history unintelligible.” “That distinction is critical to understanding indigenous North American forms of slavery, too,” added Brett Rushforth. “One can’t understand the Jesuits in Brazil without it,” Andrew Dial said.

I called Rinehart, who is currently a postdoc in the department of English and creative writing at Dartmouth, after the conversation about Grammarly unfolded online and asked him how he explained all of these fine points of language to students—one key audience for Grammarly’s services. He told me, “One thing I want to caution readers and students about in general is this idea that there are good words and bad words. Language is really too context-specific, too complicated, too variable over time” for specific recommendations to be made. “We can adjust our language in any number of situations, but it doesn’t necessarily solve a problem, so much as it introduces a new set of problems.”

Link to the rest at Slate

It’s always interesting to PG when sub-sub-sub-subcultures get upset because nobody understands their view of the world.

PG suspects that it is an impossible task for an average American who does average American things every day can to keep up with the nuances of language as interpreted by postdocs in a handful of disparate educational institutions.

When PG was an undergrad at an educational institution, he never recalls meeting a self-identified postdoc. The question is whether more education of the right sort actually makes an individual more intelligent and capable of analyzing a world in which postdocs are far rarer than any ethnic minority that
comes to PG’s mind.

While colleges and universities perform essential work, the rest of the world tends to be different, sometimes much, much, much, different than the rest of the world.

Even the worlds of colleges and universities differ substantially from each other. PG suggests that Caltech’s world is vastly different from the world of The University of Alabama. For one thing, football is a “retired sport” at Caltech and the leading religion in Tuscaloosa.

PG does not deny truth and falsehood, reality and fantasy, but he thinks that truth and reality, speaking generally, are not exclusively perceived by postdocs.

 

2 thoughts on “Why Grammarly’s New Suggestions for Writing About Slavery Were Always Going to Miss the Mark”

  1. It’s always interesting to PG when sub-sub-sub-subcultures get upset because nobody understands their view of the world.

    And now, nobody understands their words. I suppose they favor “enslaved birthing persons” rather than “women slaves.”

  2. Postdocs used to be restricted to the laboratory sciences, because that’s the only place there were outside research grants that needed team approaches (but profs’ egos required a clear subordination, and calling them “non-tenure-track faculty wannabes” Wasn’t Considered Cool). Then psychology and economics joined in… and pretty soon, “Well, there goes the neighborhood.”

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