Offensive. Nowhere.
Reading through accounts of parliamentary exchanges over the last two years, and how these have been reported in the press (a grim task) I was struck by how often the word ‘offensive’ has been used to qualify words, phrases, statements, policies, the outcomes of meetings and other awful phenomena, the legacy of this British government.
The word offensive reads as an alternative to another word. In explaining, or criticising, on the face of things pointing out the problem, as if we need to be told, it shifts away from another word. Racist, for example.
We need to begin with the first word. Any conscious move away from it … is a move away from it.
If I say that statement x is offensive I haver already stopped saying that it is racist.
Racist. From there, how about a spontaneous connection? What Freud might have called a free association. These are illuminating and intensifying. Like poetry, such words take us somewhere.
Offensive. Nowhere.
