@SavoirFaire, I’m aware of that. The knowledge of some doesn’t stop a lot of other people from making false assumptions. Remember reading about a teacher’s being fired for using the word “niggardly”? Etymology was no defense.
My grounds for speaking of an angry basis are exactly that I watched those movements unfold and saw how they affected people. 1963 was a landmark year in a lot of ways that are being recognized this year with half-century observances. I was in high school at the time, and I was paying attention. I started college the following year, right in the thick of what was actively becoming The Sixties.
One of the events of which I haven’t seen much notice this year was the 1963 publication of The Feminine Mystique, which rocked the foundations of our society as much as or more than the civil rights movement. It wasn’t the only impetus to the feminist revolution, not by a long shot, but it lit the fuse.
In the tide of feminist outrage that followed, during which “liberation” for many seemed to entail furiously denouncing everything that carried even the faintest aroma of testosterone, some women ransacked the language looking for evidence of any overt, covert, or even just aurally suggestive male bias. “History” was one of those targets. Words like “chairman” and even “human” became the subjects of diatribes. Pronouns in academic and popular nonfiction have still not recovered from the trauma.
I distance myself from the extremists now just as I did then because I didn’t and don’t think that only one minority or any one group needs liberation. I think they all—we all—do: liberation from false generalizations and stereotypes and prejudgments and irrational thinking and also from endless recriminations for the actions of long-dead ancestors whose attitudes are not our own and not condoned by us. Every group that’s gone after its rights since then has wanted to take them out of the hide of middle-class white males. That imbalance bothers me just as much as the wrongs that were being righted. Taking responsibility for one’s own errors and misdeeds is quite enough without shouldering those of misguided predecessors.
So although I am in sympathy with all those who battle genuine oppression of any kind, I have no patience with those who go looking for opportunities to take offense so they can press some unmerited advantage. Real liberation is not just a reassignment of victimhood.