Taxacom: botanical names with racist history

[alberto ballerio]

 What makes the whole matter particularly worrying is the poor background of the application by Smith and Figueiredo.
Their rationale is indicated as such:
"the epithets in question have the root caf[f][e]r- and derive from an Arabic word meaning “infidel” that was used in the toponym of a region in southern Africa and for its inhabitants. Although, when initially published, the epithets may not have been intended to offend,in present-day society they have taken on a decidedly negative connotation because the noun from which they derive is a racial slur in languages such as English, Afrikaans, Spanish and Portuguese. Aversion to using these epithets arguably applies more to plant scientists and other users of scientific plant names from Africa or of African heritage, but increasingly also to a larger user community."

They do not provide any proof or evidence of such claims, i.e. which are the words involved in common language in contemporary English, Afrikaan, Spanish and Portuguese (Keffir? Caffer?), how many times those words are still used in contemporary language, etc. Nothing is written about these important points. They also do not provide any evidence of the "alleged" aversion to use these terms by contemporary people (apart from themselves) and finally, they do not explain why a parochial alleged problem which seems to affect a small fraction of world people, requires to change names purported to be used internationally.
If we follow the same rationale of this reasoning, then also the latin adjective "niger" should have the same fate, simply because it recalls the term "nigger" used as an insult in current English language. Once again, do you really think that the whole world must follow the parochial problems of a single language or of a single culture and change hundreds of names, none of them used to offend black people but rather used to denote a morphological character of a species? 
Perhaps the key-point that shows the weakness of their argument is "in present-day society they have taken on a decidedly negative connotation": this questionable statement (and probably not only questionable but also applicable only to a limited number of languages and of people), if applied as a general rule would make nomenclature a provisional business, which will depend on the ever-changing  ideological, political, and religious views of the bodies in charge of changing the names. Basically the beginning of the end of a 250 years old tradition, which will become mainly a political business.
I am pretty convinced that if what we read in The Guardian's scoop is true, then the botanists made a big mistake (and took a decision based on very superficial grounds).
Best regards,
Alberto
P.S. by the way: the etymology of Africa and afer/afra is controversial but according to some students it means "colony", so, let's wait for the next application asking to change afer/afra too because they have an embarrassing etymology!




 
    Il martedì 23 luglio 2024 alle ore 10:31:47 CEST, Stephen Thorpe via Taxacom <taxacom at lists.ku.edu> ha scritto:  
 
 
There are two rather different cases to consider. The first is names which are based on words that have become a racial (or other kind of) slur. Somehow though, we seem to be able to still refer to a female dog as a bitch and a bastard file, etc., without causing offence! Why can't we do the same with taxonomic names? I guess because bitches and bastards aren't racial or homophobic slurs. A faggot in the sense of food doesn't seem to be used very often these days, but that might just be because the food it denotes isn't very popular. Do people still refer to raccoons as coons? Can that be done without offending black people? Who knows! Anyway, the other case is names based on people who were colonialists or otherwise persona non grata according to wokie ideology. Does mention of their very name cause offence? Should we care? I'm not offended by the name Hitler, even though the Nazis bombed my great grandma! Are we going to let oversensitivity and/or virtue signaling destroy biological nomenclature?
Stephen    On Tuesday, 23 July 2024 at 07:51:45 pm NZST, Paul van Rijckevorsel via Taxacom <taxacom at lists.ku.edu> wrote:  
 
 On 23/07/2024 03:06, David Campbell via Taxacom wrote:

[...] Given that the taxonomic usage seems to be based on an
     old geographic term, faulting the taxonomic names for later
     derogatory use seems excessive. A note that these names reflect
     the geography and not the racism would seem more in order, [...]

First, these are not necessarily based on an old geographic term, 
forexample, /caffraria/ will be geographic, but /caffrorum/ isn’t, at 
least not grammatically. Secondly, the argument would seem to fit best 
in cases of names based on Rhodesia versus names based on Cecil Rhodes, 
that is, cases of names based on formal names (of countries, etc) that 
are now obsolete. For informal designations, this would seem to quickly 
become very iffy. Paul
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