Racist Language :)

The English language may acquire the dubious distinction of being racist. Why? When you use the words White or Black, the words raise the hackles of specialists and purists who would rather not use those words, especially not in an academic setting. 

In the days before the advent of the electronic gizmos, even before the West figured out how to use the Africans as slaves, learners were imbibing nuggets of wisdom from a blackboard. And then came the whiteboards, first those that needed marker pens to write on, and then their electronic counterparts which took the place of giant white screens that served to project the same wisdom of yore in bits and bytes. 

Now the academics are all equivocal in their condemnation of the use of colors such as WHITE and BLACK in the context of a board. They argue that these colors incited the majority, victimized the minority, and segregated the groups into believing that humanity's worst moments are not only not over, but right round the corner. They have therefore banned the association of these colors to the board whose primary objective, they opine, is to dissolve these differences and elevate humanity from the pit of segregation. 

With the colors removed from their vocabulary, the academics still needed to call their boards by some means and they came up with the innovative expression: dry erase board. While this serves the purpose, it still does not bring to mind the color of the board which learners the world over have come to identify with. Even the online guru Salman Khan of the Khan Academy uses a black, ouch! Sorry. He uses a dark screen to write on, if that expression is allowed. A tutor who uses a board commented rather piquantly that whiteboards are racist and blackboards aren't black! It is not the board, obviously, that is at issue here; it is the color of the board. Nah, it is not the color either; what is at stake here is the name of the color. 

It is no good changing the color of the board to say yellow. That color too has been in some murky use. Even the word color could be regarded as racist and the academics would do well to remove the color spectrum from the subjects. They may not ban the rainbow from the sky, but at least they can ban the use of a prism in the laboratory. Color, that faculty of the eye that few animals in the world share with humans, has now become a dangerous thing to handle. Perhaps we should all use the word pigment. And think up new words for the pigments in the rainbow. After all, the world of humans still need the pigments even if we manage to ban the colors of Nature.