A case of semantics

(Site update: I have enabled the word verification feature on the comments in order to hopefully fend off the invasion of spambots that have beseiged my blog over the past couple of days. Sure, it is a losing battle and the spambots will soon be our overlords and I for one welcome the change. Oh well... Super, I'm sorry to make you go through an extra step before posting your comments at two in the morning.)

I figure that I might as well chime in on the use of the word refugee when discussing the victims of the hurricane. Most of the debate has focused on whether or not it is a racist description. From my point of view, that is the wrong arguement. As a word, refugee does not have any implications as to race. But it does have great implications with regards to class and to distance.

First of all, the term refugee immediately refers to a third world issue. We do not talk about the Irish refugees during the potato famine, we call them immigrants. Those who fled communism were called defectors. Those fleeing horrible situations in the third world (whether in Africa, Asia or the Americas) are referred to as refugees. That is part of the reason why it was a poor word for the media to use to describe the situation: it immediately cast the victims as being equivalent to third world citizens.

But to me the biggest problem is that to the American ear, the word refugee means "a problem that is happening someplace else." We've never used the word refugee to discuss an American problem. Even in the dust bowl, when you had the Okies fleeing to California, the word refugee wasn't used, even though it was probably applicable. But we've heard the word used in describing places like the Sudan or Vietnam or the Balkans. That's why I didn't like the fact that the media used the term: it created this artificial distance in the minds of the American audience. It gave an impression that "don't worry, this is all happening far away" when in fact it was happening in the soul of the nation.

While I don't like the fact that the media used the term I do understand why they did. In cases like this you are trying to find a way to express the immense disaster in a very precise way. Evacuee doesn't possess the life or death struggle that took place those first few days. Victim is too imprecise (and a weak term at best). I'm not sure what the right word is. In cases like this, it takes a while for our vocabulary to catch up to what we witness.