A few days ago, I was listening to an installment of the Vox podcast The Weeds.  Jane Coaston, not a Weeds regular, but also from Vox, was recounting an incident when she, a biracial woman, was out with her mother, who is white.  At a moment when she was far enough away from her mother to not be obviously with her, she was approached by a guy from the Nation of Islam.  He was regaling her with the whites-are-devils Nation of Islam line, when her mother came up to her.  The guy was taken aback and really angry.

Ms. Coaston's comment on the incident was that, while this man was full of racial hate, he wasn't an example of racism.  She didn't elaborate too much, but I think the point was that, absent the power to oppress, there can be no racism.  Probably what has happened here is that after years of promoting the notion that racism is not just individual conscious prejudice, but can be the disadvantages and violence built into a social system that an individual can unknowingly participate in, one large segment of the liberal/progressive community has wholly abandoned the notion that racism can be meaningfully located in one person's thoughts and feelings.  I am entirely convinced that systemic racism exists and is a significant force in the world.  But I don't see why we should shift the definition from one thing to another thing, rather than just extend the definition from the individual to the systemic, which was the original impetus.  That walking through the darkness with a flaming torch illuminates what is ahead by obscuring what is behind is a metaphor we do not need here.

Actually, I think I do see why the definition has shifted. First, removing the possibility that an member of an oppressed minority can be racist, no matter how irrational their prejudice or how indiscriminate their hatred of everyone in some other group, helps in retaining the absolute virtue of the oppressed.   This makes the struggle for justice seem simpler and more straightforward than it likely is.  And then there is the postmodern sense that everything reduces to power relationships.  So then an impotent hatred of another race is not racism at all.

FIGURE AND THE GROUND OF BEING


Look down
upon the steep, painted canyon wall
to the silver, sun-bright water
and lament what
has washed away,
what other beauty
it might have made,
what was lost
from the uncarved jade.

Of T's and D's and Glottal Stops

I thought perhaps that the odd person reading this blog might be interested in an email I sent to John McWhorter about his podcast Lexicon Valley.  A few items of information that may be helpful:  A glottal stop is the sound represented by the apostrophe in the more authentic-sounding pronunciation of  "Hawai'i" and the sound between the syllables in "unh-uh," the negative counterpart of "uh-huh."  The capital I represents what we usually call a "short I" like in "bit,"and the capital E represents a "short E" like in "bet."

I'm writing about the "Tee Time" installment of the the podcast.  The examples you played of people saying words ending t-vowel-n seemed to me to be examples of how, in my experience, Americans have always in pronounced those words except when they're teachers giving a spelling test.  In the college linguistics I took a few decades ago, this phonological phenomenon was described as an unreleased t and then a syllabic n with the omission of the intervening vowel made possible by the t and n being made with the same position of the mouth, particularly the tongue, so that the stop t can be seamlessly transformed into the nasal continuant n.  And this explanation satisfied my sense of what I was hearing in other people's speech and what I was doing in my own.  I can see, however, that a glottal stop perhaps does occur as one is arranging one's mouth for the n.  Maybe this is now the received analysis or maybe my professor just didn't apprise us of an alternate interpretation.

Be that as it may, I have a hunch that at least some of the people writing to you asking about where the t went are noting a somewhat different--and possibly more recent--phenomenon.  Beginning at least twelve years ago when I was last at a previous place of employment, I recall the way some of the younger women said words like button or cotton being particularly jarring.  They used for the t  a glottal stop that was made more distinct by the restoration of the vowel before the n, so that cotton sounded like kaq-In.  (I'm using a q for a glottal stop.  I should probably get an IPA font.)  And I remember krq-In for curtain being wholly unintelligible until a little more context clarified what was meant.

While I've continued to hear this -qIn pronunciation more and more often, even more recently I've begun to hear the t pronounced as a d with accompanying changes in the vowel before the n and in the analysis of the syllables in a word so that button sounds like buh-dEn.  And further, the vowel restoration seems to be spreading to words ending d-vowel-n.  On our local public radio station in Toledo, Ohio, a recorded announcement about an event at a botanical garden ran over and over for a week.  One speaker, a young-sounding woman, consistently pronounced garden as gar-dEn.  Another speaker, a possibly older-sounding man, alternated between gardn and gar-dEn.

And speaking of alternating pronunciations, I was listening to Vox's The Weeds podcast last week and one of the commentators pronounced the Russian president's name as puq-In, but all other t-vowel-n words differently, e.g., rotten as ro-dEn.  And maybe sometimes the E collapsed toward a schwa. I wonder whether you think the pronunciation of syllables such as these are changing in two ways at once or whether for some people rotten as roq-In is the old, established way to say it and they're in the process of changing to ro-dEn.