refugee talk

More debate about use of the word “refugee”:
– Scott Libin at Poynter, in effect, chickens out. “I see no easy answers to any of these questions,” blah blah blah. His disguised point seems to be: It’s silly to ban the word, but enough people have bitched about it that we might have to.
– The National Association of Black Journalists says it’s bad, falling on the silly backing that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has a legal definition for the word that requires international border crossing. Well of course it does — that’s a legal definition tied to triggers in international law. Michael Chertoff doesn’t get to decide how we use language.
In any event, the appeal to international law is clearly not the issue here. That’s a front for the real reason people are opposed to the term — they view it as an insult. That’s why the head of NABJ calls it a “loaded” word. If it were just inaccurate in his mind, he wouldn’t call it “loaded.” He thinks it’s an insult to be called a refugee. I don’t think so. And I think that opinion is itself an insult to refugees around the world.
NABJ suggests, among other things, “survivor.” Ugh. This reminds me of the people who call the media whenever we refer to a “cancer patient.” They insist that, from the moment of diagnosis on, the correct term is “cancer survivor.” Look, call yourself whatever you want. But you can’t chip perfectly good words out of the English language because you want to play Orwell.
– Don Wycliff at the Chicago Tribune agrees with me. “I find myself astonished at the hubbub that has blown up around this particular word…if the implication is that Americans cannot be sent fleeing from fires, floods, famine and other disasters, natural or manmade, or from political oppression, then it is plainly untrue…It is particularly surprising to hear [Jesse] Jackson making the argument against ‘refugees’ in terms of American exceptionalism, because part of what has made him such an effective participant in this country’s political debates of the last few decades has been his ability to puncture notions of American exceptionalism.”
– This wire story details which news organizations have bought into all this. Killing “refugee” off: The Washington Post (disappointing), The Boston Globe, NPR. Keeping it alive: The New York Times, Associated Press.