Racism, classism, charisma and one way to suppress their impact

[ionelv]

Long ago, I had a thought that lawyers have too much influence with the jury due to their charisma, appearance and/or oratory skills. One way I thought of erasing that unfair advantage was to require lawyers (and all who address the court and the jury) to be hidden from jury's eyes and that their voices should be disguised (e.g., speech-to-text-to-standard-speech translator). It dawned on me that this masking would be very useful in everyday interactions to create a level playing field where racism, classism, charisma, etc have undue influence. Of course, suppressing oratory skills would be the hardest (especially for those that the lingua franca is not their native tongue or for those that did not benefit from any formal training in oratory), and some would say even unacceptable (e.g., there are good causes that require orators).

Related to the above are a few recent reads: Racism rebranded: how far-right ideology feeds off identity politics (K Malik), A history of “wokeness” -- Stay woke: How a Black activist watchword got co-opted in the culture war (Aja Romano). The Romano article evoked some thoughts on how the right usually highjacks positive words and jiu-jitsu's them into negative/derogatory words (e.g. woke, liberal). It is also not surprising that some popular media wordsmiths were conservatives (e.g. WF Buckley Jr, George Will, Rush Limbaugh, Will Safire). To be fair there are some eloquent contemporary progressives as well (e.g. Noam Chomsky, James Baldwin, MLK, Malcolm X).

LE: What white people can do for racial justice.

Comments

[ionelv]

In 2022, WaPo had a good history of the word woke going all the way back to the 1930 founding of the Nation of Islam.