Not sure what those campus protesters are talking about when they spit out unfamiliar jargon? Blake Neff and Jonah Bennett of the Daily Caller offer some help.
Modern students arriving on college campuses today will find themselves learning about far more than just mathematics, writing, science, and other well-worn aspects of a liberal college education.
College campuses are known for their political ferment, and modern campus activists have popularized or outright invented a vast vocabulary of new lingo to underly new identities and new grievances, whether they involve race, sex, or categories yet unknown to most. With that in mind, The Daily Caller News Foundation has compiled a short list of some of the most frequently-used terms, so that the brothers, sisters, parents, and grandparents among our readers won’t be baffled and caught unawares by their use:
2-Spirit: A broad term that derives from individuals in Native American tribes, such as masculine women and feminine men, who did not follow conventional gender roles (the word itself is translated from the Ojibwe language). It has recently emerged as a popular label for gay and transgender individuals with Native American backgrounds.
Ableism: Hostility or discrimination on the basis of one’s physical or mental abilities. Common language is often labeled as “ableist” for thoughtlessly implying that certain disabilities are a bad thing, e.g. “my job is lame” or “his ex-girlfriend is insane.” …
… Cisgendered: A person who identifies with the sex they were born with, e.g. a boy believing that he is, in fact, a boy. Rooted in the Latin prefix cis-, meaning “on this side of.” Popularized as the counterpart to transgendered, in order to make the two appear more equal. Some are “cis men,” others are “trans men,” and the two are equally ordinary.
Color-blind: The goal of having institutions and policies that aspire to ignore race completely. According to many activists, color-blind systems are undesirable because they are unachievable. It is allegedly impossible to ignore race, and supposed efforts to do so are often criticized as a surreptitious way to entrench racist systems.
