Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson issued a scathing rebuke of dehumanizing language at a news conference Friday after a question he was asked about the city’s spending on “illegal aliens.” Though Johnson was less than sincere when he suggested that “illegal aliens” are something you’d expect to find in a work of science fiction, he was correct to argue that such phrasing erases the humanity of the people in question.
“We don’t have illegal aliens,” he said, before making the science-fiction remark. “The legal term for my people were slaves. You want me to use that term, too? So, look, let’s just get the language right. We are talking about undocumented individuals that are human beings. The last thing I’m going to do is accept that type of racist, nasty language to describe human beings.”
To Johnson’s point about Africans brought against their will to the New World, it was only fairly recently that there was a concerted effort to refer to them not by the noun “slave,” but by the adjective “enslaved.” To say, for example, that slaves were imported from Africa, is to say “slaves” is all they were and had ever been. To say that they were “enslaved” is to describe what happened to them without reducing them to that condition.
We’ve seen a similar push to describe people not as “prisoners,” but as “incarcerated” and, in the current matter, a push to say that even if laws have been violated, that doesn’t make “illegal” the right adjective to describe the people who violated them.
In 2013, The Associated Press, which publishes a stylebook that most mainstream news organizations use, thought better of its previous guidance and steered journalists away from “illegal immigrant” and its variations “illegal alien,” “an illegal” and “illegals.”
The AP said then that it “had in other areas been ridding the Stylebook of labels.” For example, it stopped using “schizophrenic” as a label in favor of saying someone has been diagnosed with schizophrenia.
In 2013, The Associated Press steered journalists away from “illegal immigrant” and its variations. “And that discussion about labeling people, instead of behavior, led us back to ‘illegal immigrant’ again.” Journalists are encouraged to say someone entered the country illegally or illegally overstayed a visa. Therefore, “illegal immigration” is fine, but “illegal immigrant,” is not. Perhaps to Johnson’s chagrin, the AP doesn’t like “undocumented” either because, as it posted to social media in 2022, “Many immigrants and migrants have some sort of documents, but not the necessary ones.” Johnson has been both cheered by progressives and jeered by conservatives for dressing down the person who used “illegal alien,” and some have pointed out that the phrase has a legal meaning and therefore ought to be OK to use. But in the same way that people can, and do, object to the use of “homosexual” as a noun or “Black” as a noun, it’s not hard to understand why they might object to “illegal alien” and especially “illegal” as a noun. There are words and phrases that become understood as slurs, even if they didn’t necessarily originate as such.
Jarvis DeBerry is an opinion editor for MS NOW Daily. He was previously editor-in-chief at the Louisiana Illuminator and a columnist and deputy opinion editor at The Times-Picayune.
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