Posted by Jay Livingston
I disagree with those who reject all use of the passive voice as though it were a Voldemort-like construction that must not be uttered. The problem with the passive voice is not that it’s wrong or “weak,” but that it can create ambiguity.
Ann Coulter, in a column a few days ago wrote the following paragraph:
Perhaps, someday, blacks will win the right to be treated like volitional human beings. But not yet.It doesn’t mean what you probably think it means – and what many on the left thought it meant. Coulter was writing about The New York Times’s treatment twenty-eight years ago of the shooting of an unarmed Black teenager, Edmund Perry, by a White undercover cop. The teenager was a graduate of Exeter and was to enter Stanford in the fall. The Times at first framed the story as a bright future snuffed out.*
But Perry was not an innocent victim. In fact, he was trying to mug the cop. When that fact became known, the Times changed its theme. Here is Coulter’s sentence just before the money paragraph quoted above.
When it turned out Perry had mugged the cop, it was no one's fault, but a problem of “violence,” “confusion” and “two worlds” colliding.Then comes that sentence about winning the right to be treated like volitional human beings. But whose treatment of Blacks are we talking about? Many readers would assume Coulter meant society or White people in general and that she was saying that until Blacks win that right, Whites may legitimately treat them as something other than human beings.
But in fact, Coulter is talking about the treatment of Blacks by the liberal media. It is they, says Coulter, who are denying volition to Blacks. The liberal media treat Blacks as though their behavior were entirely caused by external circumstances rather than by their own decisions. Here is how the sentence should have read:
Someday, Blacks will win the right to have the liberal media treat them as volitional human beings.The passive-voice construction allows her to omit that crucial element.
Did Coulter deliberately create this ambiguity? We don’t know, and I assume that she would deny it. But she is a professional writer, and she does delight in baiting liberals. So it would not at all surprise me if in writing this sentence and in setting it apart as an entire paragraph, she was already, with a satisfied smirk, imagining how liberals would react.
Stick it to those hated liberals by writing an agent-less “to be treated” – the passive-aggressive voice.
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* Coulter says, “the media rushed out with a story about Officer Lee Van Houten being a trigger-happy, racist cop.” But except for one sentence from The Village Voice (“Perry was "just too black for his own good," ) she gives no quotes from the Times or anywhere else to illustrate her view.
I think it’s pretty obvious what Coulter would say to this – not all Whites are alike. They do not all think alike, especially on the question of why some people do bad things. Liberal Whites see Blacks as controlled by external forces. Thus liberals deny that Blacks have volition. Conservative Whites say that everyone, including Blacks, can choose what to do – to commit crimes or not, to do well in school or not, to have a conventional family or not.
ReplyDeleteHer view of liberals is a caricature, and in the article I linked to, she doesn’t provide any quotes from the Times or anywhere else to illustrate her assertion that liberals deny that Blacks have volition. But as for conservatives, basically they hate the idea that people are affected in any important way by external forces or even the history of their own exeriences.