Thread by @matt_cam

Save yourself a click: it's "alien." The word is alien.

"Alien" is a 700-yr-old word good only for an imm. system based in 19th-century thinking. It is etymologically rooted in otherness, ideologically predicated in suspicion, & legally useless. Kill it

cnn.com/2021/01/21/pol…

"Alien" doesn't just mean someone who is not a U.S. citizen. It very literally emphasizes strangeness. Otherness. Not belonging.

I'd prefer to use "non-citizen" for the same reason that Robert Law would prefer that @axios use "former Trump official" instead of "sociopath"

Take this @CBP story from a few days ago about the rescue of "aliens in distress," including an "alien female trapped in thick vegetation." This kind of language fuels the industrialized world's largest, cruelest, & least humane law enforcement agency.

cbp.gov/newsroom/local…

Look at these pictures. Just actually *look* at them.

I've spent 15 years reading these arrest reports and bearing witness to the system, institutions, & people responsible for these atrocities.

You see people. They see "aliens."

Here's an excerpt from ICE's mission statement, from which we learn that they don't separate families, indefinitely detain people, or arbitrarily destroy lives.

They "remove aliens."

("Deportation" was legally changed to "removal" in the '96 reforms for the same reason.)

And yes--"alien" is just a word. Abolishing it won't #AbolishICE, any more than changing "removal" back to "deportation" will stop a single deportation.

But words matter. We lose significant ground just by *using* these words.

Nativists know this. Why don't we?

If you now consciously decide, as I hope you do, never to use the word "alien" again & encourage ppl around you to do the same, you have done an actual thing that you can do to make your world just the tiniest bit better. Pls don't mistake that for actual work. But do it anyway.