For political discourse to survive, we must be more honest about language

When I was an English literature undergraduate, we were all very careful to avoid what used to be called the ‘intentional fallacy’. This is the idea that you can use a text to get at what the author ‘really meant’. The so-called New Critics said, quite reasonably, that the text is all you’ve got to go on and, what’s more, it’s impertinent and irrelevant for a critic to start trying to figure out, say, whether Shakespeare is a racist from the evidence in ‘My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun’.

This is a useful principle in academic literary criticism (or one sort of academic literary criticism; that’s an argument for another day). But it seems to be trickling out into a place where it is less useful — public life.

An example: the black crime writer Walter Mosley recently quit the writers’ room on Star Trek: Discovery because a fellow writer complained about his use of language. As Mosley reported in a piece for the New York Times, he got a call from human resources. ‘A pleasant-sounding young man said, “Mr Mosley, it has been reported that you used the N-word in the writers’ room.” I replied, “I am the N-word in the writers’ room.’’’

That complainant was acting like a true New Critic. He looked at the utterance. He ignored the personal and historical context. He ignored the fact that Mosley was indeed the N-word in the writers’ room, and that he’d been using the word in a piece of reported speech. (Mosley: ‘I had indeed said the word in the room. I hadn’t called anyone it. I just told a story about a cop who explained to me, on the streets of Los Angeles, that he stopped all niggers in paddy neighbourhoods and all paddies in nigger neighbourhoods, because they were usually up to no good.