According to the New York Post, The Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work at University of Southern California announced that it will no longer use the word “field”. Whether this story is real or satirical, it is still a righteous idea.
Language can be powerful, and phrases such as ‘going into the field’ or ‘field work’ maybe have connotations for descendants of slavery and immigrant workers that are not benign.
The staff at the Babbling Bear demand that Cornell athletics replace the word “field” with “play surface” in the following instances: Berman Field, Dodson Field, Hoy Field, McGovern Fields, Robison Alumni Fields, and Schoellkopf Field. We hope that Cornell will also give great thought to changing the names of microaggressive names of Field Hockey and Track & Field. After all, microaggressions have no place in sports.
We should also aggressively ban any use of the terms “cotton”, “plantation”, “South”, and “service’.
If only the news from USC were satirical…