Word of the Week: ‘Practicum’
Nicholas Clairmont
“We know that changing terminology can be challenging, and a complete transition will take some time,” notes the University of Southern California’s Susan Dvorak-Peck School of Social Work in a memo announcing a “Department Name Change.” It is kind of them to be so understanding.
This memo comes from the “Practicum Education Department,” and it informs recipients that “we have decided to remove the term ‘field’ from our curriculum and practice and replace it with the term ‘practicum.’” The school’s reasoning for this important change is this: “This change supports anti-racist social work practice by replacing language that could be considered anti-Black or anti-immigrant in favor of inclusive language. Language can be powerful, and phrases such as ‘going into the field’ or ‘field work’ may have connotations for descendants of slavery and immigrant workers that are not benign.” As with so many recent attempts to replace a short and comprehensible term with a longer and weirder one, the reason is a strange notion of justice that sees phantom offenses everywhere without taking a moment to ask whether the offense-taking is in any way reasonable or would even occur to someone who does not get paid to find connections between ordinary human speech and the history of oppression on a group basis. (In an ugly and imprecise shift of usage, this is now, regrettably, often termed, simply, “hate.”)
I am always gobsmacked by these things when I consider the reasoning process that must go on in the minds of people who support them. They sit around hearing “field work,” then jump to slavery being a type of work often taking place in a field, then the idea that descendants of slaves will hear that connotation and think the same thing, then the idea that the same descendants will, having never otherwise heard about slavery, be hurt enough upon the reminder to not function as well in or around social work academics, rendering the usage a problem for “inclusion”? No step of this seems tendentious to them? Not one? What about if a descendant of slaves sees a member of the species Apodemus sylvaticus — also known as a field mouse? Perhaps she or he will be reminded of the word, and the whole psychological process from reminder to word to trauma response to noninclusion to inequity will play out. Better classify pest control as anti-racism to be safe.
Maybe I am being glib. Slavery is nothing to joke about. But at a certain point, the people making these types of language changes aren’t even taking themselves seriously. I am just following their lead. This has become a common type of story, after all. A key moment in the rise of language policing in our culture occurred when Harvard University and others moved away from using the term “master” because of its association with the American enslavement of black people. “Masters” on a college campus refers to the Latin “magister,” which means “teacher.” To be the master of something in the sense of controlling or owning or dominating it (from the Latin “dominus”) has no special linguistic connection to the increasingly distant usage in the American South for slave masters over, say, linguistically closer-linked terms such as “lord” (e.g., referring to a medieval landowner or Jesus Christ) or the verb “to master,” as in what you might do to a skill.
It can be hard to stop your own momentum once you get going in any, uh, practicum of human endeavor. The people behind USC’s new policy, working with the “Eliminate Racism Grand Challenge for Social Work,” have mastered the art of overthinking the moral implications of connotations of words — even connotations they have merely imagined. If, however, they actually wish to help racial justice as a movement, they should stop being such an effective embarrassment to it.