Dr. Word says: A person cannot be “an illegal”

by David Safier

I decided I was an illegal at one point last night, at least by the current, rightwing definition which has been picked up by the public and the media. I was driving 42mph down a road and saw the speed limit was posted at 35. I was committing an illegal act. I guess that made me an illegal.

Or did it? Is a speeder an illegal? How about a thief or a murderer? Are they illegals? Or are they people who have committed illegal acts?

I checked a few online dictionaries for a definition of "illegal." It is primarily an adjective, used in a phrase like "an illegal act." The only definition for "illegal" as a noun is "illegal immigrant."

Welcome to the right wing world where, of the many illegal acts a human being can commit, the only act that equates personhood with being "an illegal" is entering this country without the required documentation.

It is dehumanizing to define a person as "an illegal," as if that is the essence of his or her being. It is harmful to the person being defined, and it is harmful to those who relegate someone to a narrowly defined, lower class of human.

I learned as a teacher that you should never use a form of the verb "to be" to describe negative behavior by a student. For instance, when an authority figure says to a young person, "You are a liar," that defines that student's state of being — You=Liar. If the young person is confronted instead by saying, "You are not telling me the truth" or "You are lying to me," that makes it a momentary, changable thing. You may be lying to me now, it says, but you are also capable of telling the truth. I am not branding you with a permanent Scarlet L.

Ralph Waldo Emerson objected to any kind of labeling of a person by a trait or profession rather than by his or her personhood. Someone is not a farmer, Emerson said. She is a person who farms. Someone is not a lawyer. He is a person who practices law. And so on.

Emerson was trying to help people acknowledge they are part of the greater human community rather than walling themselves off into smaller categories. It was a noble idea to make us better people, more in touch with our overriding humanity.

As a teacher, I tried not to stigmatize students by giving them a negative label as a state of being. I tried to respect my students as people at the same time I asked them, "So what have you done lately?" referring both to changing negative behavior (though you may have cheated on a test or not turned in your homework, your next action can be better) and continuing positive behavior (though you got an "A" on the last paper, you need to continue the same kind of effort if you want to earn a good grade on the next one). [Note: The crossed out paragraph is distracting and self indulgent, but I crossed it out rather than getting rid of it, in keeping with standard blogging practice.]

To call a person "illegal" is wrong, both from the perspective of language and basic humanity. True, I was speeding a bit last night, but that didn't make me "an illegal." Some people are committing an illegal act, a misdemeanor, by being in this country without the proper credentials (that's all it is, right? A misdemeanor?), but that doesn't make them "illegals."

Let the right wing continue to use the term "illegal" as a noun if they want, but the rest of us shouldn't pick it up, and the media, mainstream as well as sane alternative, should  remove it from their vocabulary as surely as they have removed more obvious racial and  personal slurs.