Do Images and Words Matter?

T****'s vision of land management:

a huge pile of coal

Biden's vision of land management:

not a huge pile of coal

The New York Times writes:

Days after President Biden took office, the Bureau of Land Management put a scenic landscape of a winding river at the top of its website, which during the previous administration had featured a photograph of a huge wall of coal.

At the Department of Homeland Security, the phrase “illegal alien” is being replaced with “noncitizen.” The Interior Department now makes sure that mentions of its stakeholders include “Tribal” people (with a capital “T” as preferred by Native Americans, it said). The most unpopular two words in the Trump lexicon — “climate change” — are once again appearing on government websites and in documents; officials at the Environmental Protection Agency have even begun using the hashtag #climatecrisis on Twitter.

And across the government, L.G.B.T.Q. references are popping up everywhere. Visitors to the White House website are now asked whether they want to provide their pronouns when they fill out a contact form: she/her, he/him or they/them.

It is all part of a concerted effort by the Biden administration to rebrand the government after four years of President Donald J. Trump, in part by stripping away the language and imagery that represented his anti-immigration, anti-science and anti-gay rights policies and replacing them with words and pictures that are more inclusive and better match the current president’s sensibilities. 

“Biden is trying to reclaim the vision of America that was there during the Obama administration, a vision that was much more diverse, much more religiously tolerant, much more tolerant of different kinds of gender dispositions and gender presentations,” said Norma Mendoza-Denton, a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and an author of “Language in the Trump Era: Scandals and Emergencies.”  

Now, officials in Mr. Biden’s administration are using Mr. Trump’s own tactics to adjust reality again, this time by erasing the words his predecessor used and by explicitly returning to ones that had been banished.  

“The president has been clear to all of us — words matter, tone matters and civility matters,” said Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary. “And bringing the country together, getting back our seat at the global table means turning the page from the actions but also the divisive and far too often xenophobic language of the last administration.”

One can reasonably think that if a republican is elected as president in 2024, 2028 or later, the pictures of coal and incivility will displace what Biden is doing. This political and social war is not over. It's not close to over. The pile of coal vision could very well win and bring the American experiment to an end as fascists gain the upper hand in their desperate, fear-driven escape from freedom into the comforting arms of a dictator.  

Biden's gesture is good and necessary, but it probably won't change many minds.

As attorney general, Jeff Sessions ordered his department to use the term “illegal alien” 

in all communications when describing someone who did not come to the 

United States through legal means.

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