curfew / sundown town

Kansas City, Missouri sign indicating a nighttime curfew is in effect for minors, 2013

8 June 2020

A curfew is a law or regulation requiring that people be off the streets at a certain hour. Curfews can be either temporary or permanent, and they can apply to everyone or only to certain categories of people.

The word, like many English legal terms, comes from Anglo-Norman, the dialect of French spoken in England following the Norman Conquest. The Anglo-Norman coeverfeu, a compound of couvre (imperative form, to cover) + feu (fire), an order that fires should be banked and lights extinguished. The word also applied to the tolling of bells that signaled the start of the curfew. The French word appears in the 1285 Statutes for the City of London:

Defendu est qe nul seit si hardi estre trove alaunt ne wacraunt par my les Ruwes de la Citee, apres Coeverfu persone a Seint Martyn le grant a Espeye ne a Bokuyler ne a autre arme pur mal fere, ne dount mal supecion poet avenir; ne en autre manere nule, sil ne seit grant Seignour ou altre prodome de bone conysaunce, ou lour certeyn message qi de els serra garaunty qe vount li un a lautre pur conduyte de Lumere.

(It is ordered that none be so brazen as to be found going or wandering about the streets of the city, after curfew has been tolled at St. Martins le Grand, with sword or buckler, or other arms for doing harm, or whereof evil suspicion might arise; nor any in any other manner, unless he be a great lord or other lawful person of good repute, or their certain messenger, having their warrants to go from one to another, with lantern in hand.)

Curfew appears in English by c. 1330 when it is used in the poem The Seven Sages of Rome, found in the Auchinleck Manuscript, Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, Advocates 19.2.1:

Þan was þe lawe in Rome town,
Þat wheþer lord or garsoun,
Þat after corfu bi founde rominde
Faste men schoulden hem nimen and binde
And kepen him til þe sonne vprising,
And þan bifore þe fo[l]k him bring
And þourgh toun him villiche driue.

(Then was the law in Rome town,
That [anyone] whether a lord or servant,
Who is found roaming after curfew
That men should quickly take and bind him
And keep him until the sun’s rising,
And then bring him before the people
And drive him humiliatingly through town.)

The basic meaning of curfew hasn’t changed since the medieval period, except that we no longer ring bells to announce its start. But while the meaning hasn’t changed, the word has gained an additional connotation in the American context. During the Jim Crow era, it was a common practice for municipalities to impose curfews on Blacks, requiring them to be off the streets or to even leave the city limits by a certain time, usually at sundown.

The term sundown town, denoting a municipality where Blacks were not welcome after dark, appears by 1936, when it appears in Janet Seville’s Like a Spreading Tree:

Few realize, too, that the “sundown” towns of white faces were a Negro may not be found after dark with safety are matched by Negro towns, South and North, where a white face is a novelty.

Even older is the phrase don’t let the sun go down (or set) on you. It appears by the 1890s. The Oxford English Dictionary has a citation from the McKinney, Texas Democrat of 25 April 1895 that reads:

“Don't let the sun go down on you here to-morrow negro. Yours truly, White Caps.” This note [...] penned on the tent of some negroes.

Cap here refers to well capper, an oil field worker. I have not found a copy of the Democrat of that date to determine the wider context. But I did find a remarkably similar example from the Dallas Morning News of 13 May 1897 referring to the town of Savoy in central Texas after a group of black workers were hired to replace striking white workers. I don’t know if these are two separate incidents or if the OED got the date wrong:

Last night a miniature coffin was placed in the yard of their quarters. The coffin contained a hangman’s knot, some cartridges and the following note:

“Colored section boys: Don’t let the sun go down on you here Saturday night. If you do this is your fate. You give us the dodge Sunday night or you would have come up missing, so we will give you until Saturday night to leave. If you let the sun go down on you Saturday night here you will go to h—ll a glimmering. Bill and Caleb will get the same thing if they keep your any other n[——]rs any longer. We Will be there Saturday or Sunday night, so be prepared.

OLD TIME WHITECAPS.”

The parties committing the depredations are not known, but the whole affair is regarded with disapproval by the best element of the community.

And this report about Port Arthur, Texas appeared in the Detroit Free Press of 4 September 1901:

Not far from Beaumont there is a place called Port Arthur, which is settled by many people from Michigan, but particularly from the New England States, and soon after the town was established, a sign was found there reading: “N[——]r, don’t let the sun go down on you in Port Arthur.” There was considerable comfort in that sign for us southerners.

[The expurgation of hell is in the original, but the elisions of the N-word in these quotations are mine. The unexpurgated word appears in the original articles.]

So, the implementation of a curfew in the United States, even if not explicitly targeted at Blacks, carries with it a considerable amount of racist baggage.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2006, s.v. coverfeu.

Brunner, Karl, ed. The Seven Sages of Rome (Southern Version). Early English Text Society, O.S. 191. London: Oxford UP, 1933, 60. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“Getting Rich in Texas.” Detroit Free Press, 4 September 1901, 5. ProQuest.

Middle English Dictionary, 2018, s.v. curfeu n.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. curfew, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, January 2018, s.v. sundown, n., sun, n.1.

Seville, Janet E. Like a Spreading Tree: The Presbyterian Church and the Negro. New York: Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., 1936, 11. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“Statutes for the City of London” (1285). The Statutes of the Realm (1810), vol 1 of 11. London: Dawsons, 1965, 102. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“White Cappers’ Work.” Dallas Morning News, 13 May 1897, 1. Newsbank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Photo credit: Paul Sableman, 2013, Wikimedia Commons, used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

bogey / boogie man

7 June 2020

What do a bad score on a golf hole, an enemy aircraft, and a child’s nightmare have in common? The names for them all come from an old word for a ghost or evil spirit, in another word, a bogey.

The root of the term is bug, meaning a ghost or goblin. The origin of the root is uncertain, though. It’s probably from a common Germanic root, but there are also Welsh and Irish cognates, which allows for a possible Celtic origin for the word. These, however, appear later and are probably borrowings from English rather than vice versa. Bug appears c. 1395 in a Wycliffite translation of the Roman Catholic Bible, in Baruch 6.70:

As a bugge either a man of raggis in a place where gourdis wexen kepith no thing, so ben her goddis of tree.

(As a bug or a scarecrow in a place where cucumbers grow does nothing, so do their wooden gods.)

In Scotland and the north of England, bug developed into bogle, the use of which dates to the opening years of the sixteenth century when it appears in the Scottish poet William Dunbar’s The Tretis of the Twa Mariit Wemen and the Wedo, where one woman uses it to describe her slovenly and unattractive husband, lines 111–12:

The luf blenkis of that bogill fra his blerde ene
(As Belzebub had on me blent) abasit my spreit.

(The love glances of that bogey from his bleary eyes
—as if Beelzebub had looked upon me—abased my spirit.

The form bogey comes to us either from bogle or directly from bug, we can’t tell which. It’s a much later development, appearing in the nineteenth century. The earliest use of bogey that I’m aware of is in a nickname for the devil. From Thomas Ingoldsby’s 1838 “Grandpapa’s Story—The Witches’ Frolic”:

The cups pass quick,
The toasts fly thick,
Rob tries in vain out their meaning to pick,
But hears the words “Scratch,” and “Old Bogey,” and “Nick.”

The word is generalized within two decades, when it’s used metaphorically to refer to menacing humans in Sherard Osborn’s 1857 Quedah:

It may be supposed that nothing was more keenly sought for, by all on board the “Hyacinth,” than news about Malay pirates, those ogres, those bogies of the Archipelago.

The golfing sense of bogey appears by 1891 and comes from the idea of a phantom player. The original golf sense was that of par, the score that one is expected to beat. This system, which is the basis for modern professional golf tournaments, was originally dubbed the ground score. Supposedly in 1890 one player, a Major Wellman, who was unfamiliar with the new system and evidently disappointed with his own performance on the links, took a cue from a popular song of the moment, “The Bogey Man,” and claimed to be playing just such a figure. The name caught on and appeared in print by the next year. From the 28 November 1891 issue of The Field:

The members of this club have lately been trying, with success, a somewhat novel form of competition, introduced from Great Yarmouth by an ex-member of the U.S.G.C. The object of the scheme is to decide a competition by holes, without the lengthy process of everyone playing everyone else. The competition is conducted by all the players pitting their scores against a fixed round, with which an imaginary Col. Bogey challenges all comers, and it is won by the player who inflicts the most condign punishment on, or suffers least ignominious defeat, at the hands of this Col. Bogey.

The sense of bogey being one over par developed in the United States, a modification of the original British sense of bogey being par. The new sense appears by 1930 when it appears in the Los Angeles Times on 13 January:

The eighteenth, a difficult par 4, netted Smith a bogey, when his second stopped in the tall grass on a sloping hillside lie. He was on in three and down in two putts, his putt for a 4 just sliding by the cup.

The verb, meaning to shoot one over par on a hole, appears by 1935. From the Miami Daily News of 14 January 1935:

Bryan then bogied the next three holes, allowing Gormley to win them with par figures for four straight to forge ahead, one up.

The air force use of bogey to mean an unidentified aircraft dates to World War II. It is, obviously, also from the sense of ghost or phantom. From a story in the New York Herald Tribune (and syndicated to many other papers) on 11 April 1943, an American pilot tells of his time flying with the RAF in 1940:

On our first night-fighter patrol, we learned that teamwork between planes and ground radio stations is a most vital element. One foggy morning at 5:30 a.m., a flash came to our dispersal hut. A “bogey” (unidentified aircraft) had been detected by ground stations as it started across the Channel toward England. Interception was ordered, though there was a chance it might be a friendly plane returning from a mission.
[...]
Then a laconic report came through from the nearest ground station: “Bogey identified as ‘bandit’” (enemy aircraft).

Finally, the boogey-man (also boogie-man and booger-man) is an Americanism for an imaginary monster or spirit conjured up to frighten children. This term is recorded by 1847 in a story titled “White Jim,” about a young child kidnapped by native Americans:

One day, early in September, the two girls returned home after having been at work with their father in the corn-field, and inquired of their mother what had made James cry so—they heard him scream, “The booger man has got me,” but thought nothing of it, supposing him with her. The mother at once became deadly pale; she had supposed the child was safe with them all the while, and now flashed upon her the painful conviction, that he was lost in the woods, if a worse fate had not befallen him.

The kidnapping took place in 1827, but as the story is told twenty years later, we cannot assume the boy’s words are accurate renditions of what he actually said. The story ends with the boy, now a young man, being reunited with his parents. The use of booger man here, as with the use of bogey to refer to the Malay pirates, is loaded with racist undertones, identifying people of color as demonic.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

Dunbar, William. Selected Poems. Edited by Priscilla Bawcutt. London: Longman, 1996, 39.

Godwin, Frank. “Bryan Beats Gormly to Wear Mid-Winter Crown.” Miami Daily News, 14 January 1935, 18.

Ingoldsby, Thomas. “Family Stories. No. X. Grandpapa’s Story—The Witches’ Frolic.” Bentley’s Miscellany, vol. 4, July 1838, 507.

Lawrence, Edward. “Shute 147; Horton Smith 149.” Los Angeles Times, 13 January 1930.

McCloskey, John J. “Night Fighters.” New York Herald Tribune, 11 April 1943, 7.

Middle English Dictionary, 2018, s.v. bugge n.

Osborn, Sherard. Quedah; or Stray Leaves from a Journal in Malayan Waters. London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, and Roberts, 1857, 17.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. bogey, n., bogy | bogey, n.1, bogle, n.1, bug, n.1.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2006, s.v. booger, n.2. and September 2018, boogie, n.1.

“United Service Golf Club, Portsmouth.” The Field, The Country Gentleman’s Newspaper, no. 2031, 28 November 1891, 842.

tear gas / pepper spray

6 June 2020

[While I do address the origins of the terms tear gas and pepper spray in this piece, much of what follows has little to do with historical linguistics and instead comes from my experience as a U.S. Army chemical officer and my past work on the U.S. delegation to the Chemical Weapons Convention Preparatory Commission (CWC) and in the Office of the Secretary of Defense during the U.S. Senate’s CWC ratification hearings. The definition and allowed uses of “riot control agents” was a controversial topic during ratification.]

Tear gas is a general term for lachrymatory agents that typically cause eye and respiratory pain and in high doses can irritate the skin. Their effects are generally transitory but can be long-lasting and more serious if the tear gas exacerbates an underlying medical condition. And use during the COVID-19 pandemic carries additional risk by making those exposed to the gas more susceptible to the respiratory illness. Deaths from tear gas are rare, but not unknown, and tear gases are classified as “non-lethal.” They are commonly used by police forces worldwide.

The earliest use of tear gas that I have found is this item that appeared in the Asbury Park Press on 11 November 1910:

Baltimore—Answering a burglar alarms [sic]. Patrolmen Edward Miller and Joseph Bullinger heard thuds and crashes behind the basement door at William T. Corrum’s home.

With guns cocked and tear gas in reserve, they rushed in—and fled, along with a skunk that had a salad dressing jar firmly wedged over its head.

Of course, tear gas and other far more lethal chemicals were widely used during the First World War. Here is a mention of tear gas in the trench newspaper The Wipers Times from 25 December 1916:

I wonder if he’s heard the tale of the Transport Officer and the rum. Of course there are many tales of T.O.’s and rum. The oldest one of all is the one of the T.O. who was coming up with the rations. The said rations included “rum for weary soldiers.” Also the cargo had a consignment of tear-gas in a ram-jar [sic] for the M.O. to try a few experiments with. That is all the tale—but I may as well add that the T.O. recovered.

There is no chemical definition of or criteria for what constitutes a tear gas, and a wide variety of substances are labeled as such. These include: CS gas (2-chlorobenzalmalononitrile), which is used by the U.S. military; CN gas (phenacyl chloride), which is more toxic and therefore less widely used; OC agents (oleoresin capsicum), better known as pepper spray or pepper gas, which are commonly used by police forces; and Mace which is a branded product containing a mix of agents. Mace originally used CN, but that has been replaced by OC agents in most Mace products, although a CN-OC version is still on the market.

The terms pepper spray or pepper gas, referring to OC, are technically accurate, but serve as euphemisms. Oleoresin capsicum is naturally occurring in pepper plants and chili powder and is what gives those foods their pungent taste, but the chemical agents in so-called pepper spray are synthetic, concentrated, and are far nastier than anything found in nature.

The earliest use of pepper gas that I have found is in an Associated Press story of 4 October 1923 about four convicts who attempted an escape from a Kentucky prison, only to end up barricading themselves in the prison’s kitchen:

A tear gas machine brought here last night proved unavailable as the operators could not get close enuf to lossen [sic] its streams effectively. Officials devised the ingenious plan of charging the steam pipes leading to the kitchen with pepper gas intending to smoke the men out.

And the use of pepper spray to refer to a lachrymatory agent dates to at least 8 February 1964 in another Associated Press article:

Pepper Spray Gun Protects Gals Against Muggers

New York (AP)—Women who want to protect themselves against attacks by muggers are now offered a spray repellent which shoots a solution of cayenne pepper about 15 feet.

Among new products is this aerosol device called “rebuff,” offered by Animal Repellents, Griffin, Ga. The manufacturer says this liquid will make any human attacker very uncomfortable for at least 10 minutes but will have no lasting adverse effects. It’s similar to the company’s dog repellent called “Halt!” but is much weaker. The police department of Saigon has ordered 3,600 units of “Rebuff,” the company says.

The fact that there is no clear distinction between chemical agents like CS and CN and chemical agents like OC has resulted in confusion at times. For example, on 1 June 2020 the U.S. Park Police used lachrymatory agents to clear crowds from Lafayette Park, across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House, to allow Donald Trump to conduct a photo op in front of a church. The Park Police initially denied having used “tear gas,” but later retracted that statement, clarifying that they meant they hadn’t used CS or CN, when in fact they had used “pepper balls.” Then the Park Police retracted the clarification and again insisted they hadn’t used “tear gas.” The Park Police were engaging (ineptly) in semantic sophistry. The term tear gas covers all of these, and they were trying to make a distinction when none existed.

Some wonder why. if chemical warfare agents are banned by international law, specifically by the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), police are allowed to use tear gas. The simple answer is that the CWC permits use of riot control agents for domestic law enforcement purposes. I cannot speak to what is permitted under any country’s domestic laws or rules regarding use of force, and those will vary from place to place, but I can address how tear gas and pepper spray are considered under international law.

The CWC regulates toxic chemicals, placing them on three different “Schedules,” depending on their toxicity and use in warfare. But the treaty defines a riot control agent as:

Any chemical not listed in a Schedule, which can produce rapidly in humans sensory irritation or disabling physical effects which disappear within a short time following termination of exposure.

Since they are not on the treaty’s Schedules, riot control agents fall outside the treaty’s ordinary regulation and verification regime, but the treaty still requires that:

Each State Party undertakes not to use riot control agents as a method of warfare.

But the treaty does not define method of warfare. This lack of a definition is deliberate; as the negotiators could not find a definition that all could agree upon, it was left deliberately vague, to be interpreted on a case-by-case basis.

And under purposes not prohibited under this Convention, the CWC includes:

Law enforcement including domestic riot control purposes.

So, to sum up, use of tear gas in war is banned by international law, but the use of tear gas is allowed domestically and in certain undefined, non-combat military situations.

A major reason the phrase method of warfare was left vague is that the United States wanted its military to be able to use riot control agents in certain situations. U.S. military use of riot control agents is governed by Executive Order 11850 of 8 April 1975, signed by Gerald Ford as part of the post-Vietnam reforms of the military. It prohibits:

First use of riot control agents in war except in defensive military modes to save lives such as:
(a) Use of riot control agents in riot control situations in areas under direct and distinct U.S. military control, to include controlling rioting prisoners of war.
(b) Use of riot control agents in situations in which civilians are used to mask or screen attacks and civilian casualties can be reduced or avoided.
(c) Use of riot control agents in rescue missions in remotely isolated areas, of downed aircrews and passengers, and escaping prisoners.
(d) Use of riot control agents in rear echelon areas outside the zone of immediate combat to protect convoys from civil disturbances, terrorists and paramilitary organizations.

The treaty, as written, leaves intact the executive order, except for the first use phrase. Retaliatory use as a method of warfare is illegal.

Furthermore, when it gave its consent to ratification of the CWC, the Senate made the following reservation to the treaty:

(26) Riot control agents:

(A) Permitted uses. — Prior to the deposit of the United States instrument of ratification, the President shall certify to Congress that the United States is not restricted by the Convention in its use of riot control agents, including the use against combatants who are parties to a conflict, in any of the following cases:

(i) United States not a party. — The conduct of peacetime military operations within an area of ongoing armed conflict when the United States is not a party to the conflict (such as recent use of the United States Armed Forces in Somalia, Bosnia, and Rwanda).

(ii) Consensual peacekeeping. — Consensual peacekeeping operations when the use of force is authorized by the receiving state, including operations pursuant to Chapter VI of the United Nations Charter.

(iii) Chapter vii peacekeeping. — Peacekeeping operations when force is authorized by the Security Council under Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter.

(B) Implementation. — The President shall take no measure, and prescribe no rule or regulation, which would alter or eliminate Executive Order 11850 of April 8, 1975.

This reservation makes E.O. 11850, not the CWC, the only governing authority for U.S. use of riot control agents, but also prevents a future president from unilaterally changing or rescinding the executive order.

So, that’s it. The term tear gas encompasses pepper spray and pepper gas, and while its military use is limited, police are allowed to use it for domestic law enforcement purposes.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

“Another Guard Dies; Convicts Yet Barricaded in Kitchen.” The Daily Democrat (Tallahassee, FL), 4 October 1923, 1. ProQuest.

“By Order” The B.E.F. Times with Which Are Incorporated the Wipers Times, the ‘New Church’ Times, the Kemmel Times & the Somme-Times, vol. 1, no. 2, 25 December 1916. ProQuest.

“Flashes of Light: Improvised Gas Mask.” Asbury Park Evening Press, 11 November 1910, 17. ProQuest.

Ford, Gerald. Executive Order 11850--Renunciation of Certain Uses in War of Chemical Herbicides and Riot Control Agents. 8 April 1975.

Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and on Their Destruction. 27 September 2005.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. tear, n.1.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2005, s.v. pepper spray, n., pepper gas, n.

“Pepper Spray Gun Protects Gals Against Muggers.” Plain-Dealer (Cleveland, OH), 8 February 1964, 20. Newsbank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

U.S. Park Police. “Statement from United States Park Police acting Chief Gregory T. Monahan about the actions taken over the weekend to protect life and property.” 2 June 2020 (updated as of 4 June 2020).

“U.S. Senate’s Conditions to the Ratification of the CWC.” Senate Resolution 75, 105th Congress, 1st Session, 24 April 1997.

Ward, Alex. “US Park Police Said Using ‘Tear Gas’ in a Statement Was a ‘Mistake.’ It Just Used the Term Again.” Vox.com, 5 June 2020.

bogart

6 June 2020

WILLOW:      Oh, and while you're up, could I get a refill? [holds out her glass] It's just I'm so comfortable.
JOYCE:         [steps over] Of course. [takes the glass]
WILLOW:      Thanks. Xander: Oh, oh, oh, [holds up an empty bag] and another bag of cheesy chips. [tosses the bag away]
JOYCE:         [raises her eyebrows at him] Uh, you ate the last one.
XANDER:      No, there's another bag hidden behind the raisins.
JOYCE:         [sighs] I'm on it. [leaves]
XANDER:      [to Buffy] Your mom's tryin' to Bogart the cheesy chips. What's that all about?

            —Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV series), 1998

Humphrey Bogart, 1940. Publicity photo for the film Brother Orchid

To bogart something is to monopolize or hoard something that should be shared, especially a marijuana joint. The word obviously comes from the name of the actor Humphrey Bogart (1899–1957), but why? Bogart was not associated with marijuana or drug culture, and while some of the characters he played were greedy (e.g., Fred C. Dobbs in John Huston’s 1948 The Treasure of Sierra Madre), he was not particularly known for playing such characters. Rather, his screen persona was more often that of the tough guy, often a bully or gangster. And indeed, it is in the role of the tough guy that bogart makes its way into slang.

Bogart appears as a noun in early 1950s bartending slang of the American West, as recorded in a glossary published in the journal Western Folklore in 1951:

To pull a Bogart, to act tough.

But it either did not start out as restricted to a professional jargon in a particular region or it spread quickly, because it is recorded in an article on youth slang in the New York Herald Tribune on 28 February 1954:

The greatest source of these expressions today is the tough talk of the many private eyes on television, in the movies and in fiction," Rand observes. "'Doing time' is used for staying after school and the 'chain gang' refers to walking to class in groups. A bright kid who knows all the answers and makes his classmates look bad is a 'stool pigeon' and the school principal is the 'warden.' A ‘caper' is a problem in geometry, with 'Humphrey Bogart' being any tough kid."

And it wasn’t just teen and bartending slang for a tough act or person. Black slang took the word up, with bogart becoming a noun for a bully or aggressive person. And in Black slang it also became a verb meaning to coerce or intimidate, as in this example from Ebony magazine in March 1965:

Bogart, to muscle through—as in “Dig up, let's grab a boss broad and bogart our way into a boss jam.”

And from the sense of to bully, the verb quickly came to mean to take more than one’s share, particularly in the context of illicit drugs. From the 1967 edition of Maurer and Vogel’s Narcotics and Narcotics Addiction:

bogart. To take more than one’s fair share, usually by violence.

It doesn’t appear in the earlier editions of this book.

The slang verb came to the attention of mainstream America with Elliot Ingber and Larry Wagner’s 1968 song “Don’t Bogart Me,” which was recorded by the Fraternity of Man and featured in the 1969 film Easy Rider:

Roll another one
Just like the other one
You've been hanging on to it
And I sure would like a hit
Don't bogart that joint, my friend
Pass it over to me

From there, the word was passed over to a much wider audience.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

Des Hotel, Rob and Dean Batali. “Killed by Death.” Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 2.18. Created by Joss Whedon. 3 March 1998.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. bogart v., bogart n.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2005, s.v. bogart, v.

Maurer, David W. and Victor H. Vogel. Narcotics and Narcotics Addiction, third edition. Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1967, 343. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Racklin, Beaulah. “Do Kids Speak English.” New York Herald Tribune. 28 February 1954, 46.

Wallrich, William J. “Barroom Slang from the Upper Rio Grande.” Western Folklore, 10.2, April 1951, 172.

Photo credit: Warner Bros.

identity politics

3 June 2020

Identity politics is advocacy by those with a particular racial, sexual, or cultural identity for policies that benefit that particular group, as opposed to the populace at large. The term arose in the 1960s and 70s among minorities in the United States, particular among black political activists, who advocated for an end to discriminatory policies and for policies that promoted equality. But identity politics is not, by definition, limited to minorities. The dominant racial or cultural group in any given polity can also be an identity, and policies and institutions that discriminate against other groups or maintain conditions of inequality are also a form of identity politics.

The earliest use of the phrase identity politics that I have found is in the Atlanta Daily World of 16 July 1970 in an article about the politics of the Alabama governor George Wallace and how he weaponized black identity politics to give coherence and motivation to his racist supporters who were engaged in white identity politics:

Shrewdly, Mr. Wallace made capital of what could be called identity politics in which the “strange bedfellows,” the “black bloc vote” and those “big city newspapers” were made villains and targets. Such hate symbolism found easy believers among the gullible, the bigoted, the unthinking, and the odd bloc.

The Atlanta Daily World is a newspaper serving the black community of Georgia. The “what could be called” makes it clear that the term, if it were already in circulation in the black community, wasn’t instantly familiar to many of the paper’s readers.

In 1973, sociologist and political activist Todd Gitlin used identity politics to retroactively describe the radical political movements of the late 1960s, in particular the group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). He viewed identity politics negatively, believing that its, perhaps inevitable, growth stifled any hope of a truly revolutionary movement taking shape. The quotation here is long, but I believe the length is necessary to understand the context in which Gitlin uses the term:

In the absence of radical movement elsewhere in the society, [the radical student movement] could even claim that it was the embryo of revolutionary agency itself (“we are the people”)—a movement for itself. In other moments (community and factory organizing), it tried to repudiate its social reality by claiming to be the instrument, or the vanguard, or the catalyst, of social forces that really were oppressed (the poor, blacks, industrial workers, the Third World) and capable of taking power—a movement for others. Throughout the sixties the movement oscillated between these poles, searching more for identity than for strategy.

Unable to carry the burden of historical novelty, sects within SDS (Progressive Labor, Weatherman, Revolutionary Youth Movement) took on pseudo-identities as self-appointed vanguards and fifth columns of other forces. Thus they could hold onto their elitist belief in their right to rule, while claiming to have entered the revolutionary lists in the name of their chosen constituencies. They split and devoured SDS so easily because they capitalized on a widespread self-doubt: with a rush they occupied a vacuum of identity and strategy, virtually without opposition. Identity politics swallowed itself. The alternative, a conscious, programmatic radicalism, has not yet formed.

Many credit the Combahee River Collective, a black, feminist movement of the 1970s, with coining the term identity politics. While they did not, as we have seen from the earlier uses, invent the term, they did embrace it. Unlike Gitlin, they did not view an overarching revolutionary movement as a good thing for them. From their perspective, no movement led by men was ever going to truly advocate for equality for black women, and it would be up to themselves to fight for it. From the collective’s 1977 statement:

This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially the most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression. In the case of black women this is a particularly repugnant, dangerous, threatening, and therefore revolutionary concept because it is obvious from looking at all the political movements that have preceded us that anyone is more worthy of liberation than ourselves. We reject pedestals, queenhood, and walking ten paces behind. To be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough.

Since the early 1970s, the term has been used both positively and negatively.

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Sources:

The Combahee River Collective. “A Black Feminist Statement” (1977). In Zillah R. Eisenstein. Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979, 365. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Gitlin, Todd. “The Future of an Effusion: How Young Activists Will Get to 1984.” In 1984 Revisited. Robert Paul Wolff, ed. New York: Knopf, 1973, 27. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, November 2010, s.v. identity, n.

“A Spokesman for Racism.” Atlanta Daily World. 16 July 1970, 6. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.