Opinion: The problematic use of ‘problematic’ to shut down people with whom we disagree
My first disagreeable encounter with the present that means of the phrase “problematic” occurred a few years in the past.
I used to be mingling with some twenty- and thirtysomethings at an outside birthday celebration in San Francisco. It was a bit chilly, as San Francisco often is, however a definite and fairly totally different chill fell over my little dialog group as we started to debate Ben Stiller’s “Tropic Thunder,” the hilarious (for my part) film that spoofed Hollywood careerism and warfare films.
Opinion Columnist
Robin Abcarian
I don’t keep in mind why, precisely, we had been speaking a couple of movie that got here out in 2008. However all these years later, I mentioned, I used to be nonetheless laughing at Tom’s Cruise stunning position as fat-fingered, balding studo boss Les Grossman, a filthy-mouthed bully who — it was rumored — was primarily based on the producer Scott Rudin and/or Harvey Weinstein, legendary business monsters who each occur to be Jewish.
One girl checked out me and mentioned, “That position was problematic.”
“However it was satire,” I replied. “It was humorous.”
“It was nonetheless problematic,” she mentioned. “He was channeling Jewish stereotypes.”
At that time, I believed it finest to not point out one of many film’s different stars, Robert Downey Jr., who performed a white Australian actor taking part in a Black American Vietnam warfare vet. In blackface.
Feeling wrongfully admonished, I modified the topic.
However ever since, I’ve questioned how the phrase “problematic,” so imprecise, had turn out to be such an efficient insult and shorthand for somebody’s (nicely, my) ethical failure or insensitivity.
I plugged the phrase “problematic” into the Google Ngram Viewer, a web site that reveals patterns of phrase utilization in English-language literature, and found that its use has soared within the previous couple of many years and reveals no indicators of slowing.
However why?
In a 2021 Atlantic essay, Oxford political principle professor Teresa M. Bejan supplied a attainable reply:
“Lecturers like me love to explain issues as ‘problematic.’ However what can we imply? We’re not saying that the factor in query is unsolvable and even tough. We’re saying — or implying — that it’s objectionable indirectly, that it rests uneasily with our prior ethical or political commitments. … It depends on a refined type of bullying rather than mutual justification. It excludes, moderately than explains.”
Bingo.
I might recommend that the phrase “problematic” has advanced to its present charged utilization as a result of the phrase “politically incorrect,” as soon as used paradoxically by smug leftists, was hijacked by smug conservatives to indicate inflexible left-wing ideological conformity. In response to the Ngram Viewer, using “politically right” and “politically incorrect” has fallen dramatically within the final a number of years after surging within the years between 1980 and 1997. (That type of cancellation is just about what occurred to the phrase “liberal,” when the late MAGA Republican Rush Limbaugh turned it into his favourite epithet.)
Again in 2016, when former President Trump was first operating, Slate revealed an essay in regards to the bother with “problematic” and its tendency to obscure what’s actually being mentioned.
“You don’t usually hear folks saying that Donald Trump’s newest rants about immigrants or girls are problematic,” wrote Haley Swenson. “As a substitute, his phrases are referred to as racist, sexist, and harmful. However with regards to conversations about tradition and illustration, we apparently really feel the necessity to undercut, obscure, and distance ourselves from our personal arguments.”
A number of years earlier than Trump started his political ascent, a highschool pupil named Liat Kaplan began an nameless Tumblr web page referred to as “Your Fave is Problematic,” a much less direct means of highlighting the issue with “problematic.”
As Kaplan defined it years later within the New York Occasions, “The posts contained lengthy lists of celebrities’ regrettable (racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, ethnophobic, ableist and so forth) statements and actions — the stuff that will get folks canceled lately.”
With satisfaction, I’ve seen no less than the start of a backlash has been brewing in opposition to “problematic,” and its snotty little cousin “deeply problematic.”
The essayist Jill Filipovic mentioned as a lot earlier this month when she confessed within the Atlantic that she regretted embracing the idea of “set off warnings.“
“Again then,” she wrote, “I used to be satisfied that such warnings had been generally essential to convey the seriousness of the matters at hand (the time period deeply problematic seems a mortifying variety of occasions underneath my byline).”
The opposite day, I watched “Tropic Thunder” once more for the primary time in years.
It trades on and pokes enjoyable at stereotypes of Black folks, white folks, Asian folks, Jewish folks, actors, brokers, studio heads, warfare heroes. I ponder if it could get inexperienced lighted as we speak.
Personally, I discovered Cruise’s star flip as Grossman simply as hilarious and true as the primary time I noticed it, possibly much more so as a result of his alleged inspirations — Rudin and Weinstein — have gotten their karmic comeuppance within the wake of the MeToo motion.
Offensive? Maybe. Excessive? For certain. However problematic? Banish the thought.
