Not the way to fight prejudice

• When your super race-sensitive friends are describing someone to you who you know but don't know you know, they will tend to say stuff like "oh, he's pretty tall, he's got black hair, um, he wears a hat sometimes, hangs out with so and so," and either not mention "oh he's black/latino/asian" or else they will kind of squeeze it in between other identificatory variables like in the olden days when you were embarassed to buy a porno mag so you'd get like a candy bar and a newspaper too. That's not being open-minded, that's just being really bad at describing the salient properties of something. Like say I left my bright green jacket at your house. I don't call you up and say, "hey, I left my jacket... it's like a men's medium or so, got a zipper on there, a collar, I think there's a little tear in the sleeve."
  
• "People-first language" is this thing I've heard about from a few different places where institutions try to get their employees to always say "person with mental retardation/intellectual disability/learning disorder/whatever" instead of "mentally retarded/intellectually disabled person." The idea is that by changing the word order you highlight the fact that they are people first, and their disabilities are secondary. As if the arbitrary fact of word order in the English language, the result of years of conventional shifts and circumstance and practice, has some massive effect on the meaning of a sentence. As if the tall man is different from the man who is tall.

What these two strategies have in common is that they are easy. Too easy. The real actual way to overcome prejudice is to work through common ideas and learned beliefs slowly through education and exposure to the various cultural "others" we're talking about. This is hard, it takes time, it takes mental re-programming, it takes constant effort and constant attention to unique details of each day's situations. I mean, I guess people's hearts are in the right place when they take the above roads, but I think the main effect is just cluttering up the language and exhausting oneself trying to thwart vary basic perceptual principles of discrimination (not the bad kind of discrimination), and, more perniciously, giving people an outward reason to assume their journey to open-mindedness is over and done with rather than ongoing.

Jeez, I can't believe I wrote about race in my blog. I must be hurtin' for funny anecdotes or comedy food recipes lately.