Over at Talkingpointsmemo.com, they're debating the use of the term "refugee" in Katrina stories. This has come up previously.
While I can appreciate the sensitivity of the word and the feeling among some that it is slightly pejorative, I reject the objection. When people have just barely escaped drowning, been subject to abuse and are forced to move elsewhere, I don't know what else you can call them.
Yes, displaced, I suppose, but the word "refugee" has a power that is rightly applied to victims driven from their homes first by the storm and then by political decisions and our inability to help them. We may not like using the term for American citizens, as much as we're willing to toss it around when talking about Palestinians, Africans and others.
I grew up in a city with a large Eastern and Central European population, some of whom had been classified as refugees (Hungarians fleeing their failed revolution) or displaced persons (among them Poles, Slovenians, Slovaks and concentration camp survivors from World War II and the ensuing Communist struggles). If it's good enough for people who came here from other countries, why not for those born here?
Do we reject the word because we think it's not appropriate to use on Americans? Why? The myth of American exceptionalism again? Is it the label or the failure to save Americans from Katrina that shames us?
3 comments:
I never understood the objection to refugee. I certainly felt like a refuge the month I was locked out of my home by armed forces.
Most of the people I know who object to refugee are black. Further, it seems that they object because they think those of us who find the word refugee to be relevant would feel differently if most of the people who were displaced by Katrina had been white. I don't find the use of this word to be a race issue. I am appalled at how the federal government has mishandled this catastrophe, and had I been one of the evacuees, I would wear the refugee badge as a symbol of how my government had abandoned me.
I don't think it's exceptionalism. The objection, as I recall, wasn't that it was applied to Americans but that it was applied to Americans in the States, thus suggesting that they weren't Americans at all.
The distinction between refugees and DPs is important, and well attested, in international issues. But "refugee" has been used for decades (e.g. among many, www.woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/Dust_Bowl_Refugee.htm) to mean people made homeless in their own countries by natural or manmade disasters. Best I can tell, none of those uses were marked by race.
The argument from last fall strikes me as a sort of semantic magic: people claiming to know the "real" meaning of the word use it as a club to whack other people upside the head for being uninformed or insensitive. I thought it was a misguided place to be starting the revolution, but it's worth noting that when people are upset, they're usually not misguided about that -- they're actually upset. And that usually means we need to be attentive, for better or worse.
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