Why Chicago’s Brandon Johnson fumed at ‘illegal alien’ question

Jarvis DeBerry, MSNBC

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson argued that the phrase “illegal alien” strips away the humanity of the person in question.

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson issued a scathing rebuke of dehumanizing language at a news conference Friday after a question he was asked about the city’s spending on “illegal aliens.” Though Johnson was less than sincere when he suggested that “illegal aliens” are something you’d expect to find in a work of science fiction, he was correct to argue that such phrasing erases the humanity of the people in question.

“We don’t have illegal aliens,” he said, before making the science-fiction remark. “The legal term for my people were slaves. You want me to use that term, too? So, look, let’s just get the language right. We are talking about undocumented individuals that are human beings. The last thing I’m going to do is accept that type of racist, nasty language to describe human beings.”

To Johnson’s point about Africans brought against their will to the New World, it was only fairly recently that there was a concerted effort to refer to them not by the noun “slave,” but by the adjective “enslaved.” To say, for example, that slaves were imported from Africa, is to say “slaves” is all they were and had ever been. To say that they were “enslaved” is to describe what happened to them without reducing them to that condition.

We’ve seen a similar push to describe people not as “prisoners,” but as “incarcerated” and, in the current matter, a push to say that even if laws have been violated, that doesn’t make “illegal” the right adjective to describe the people who violated them.

Keep reading to discover the impact of language on how we view and treat others.

Read about enslavement and how it dehumanized those kidnapped from Africa.

More Black news.