SEE BITTER SCOLDING: Woke. In. Space! CBS Host Apologizes for Saying ‘Mankind:’ ‘I’m Sorry. I’m Sorry.’
In space, no one can hear you scream; but the aliens can apparently pick up your virtue signals on their scanners. CBS Mornings co-host Vlad Duthiers was sending out distress calls during Monday’s show after he was scolded by Dr. Mae Jemison (the first black woman in space) because he used the highly offensive term “mankind” to refer to the entire human species.
* * * * * * * * *
Duthiers immediately stepped in it again with his comments about space travel being a benefit to “mankind.” Again, he drew a swift scolding from Jemison:
DUTHIERS: So, explain to our audience why even a trip like this one, all the trips that we take into space, benefit mankind.
JEMISON: Um, so, it benefits humankind.
“Humankind, I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” Duthiers pleaded.
She then proclaimed that she was, “going to keep correcting the mankind and the man-made, and the man-missions because this is exactly what this mission is about, is expanding the perspective of who does space.”
Jemison’s high horse had legs that stretched up past the Karman line (international line that denotes where outer space begins).
As Thomas Sowell wrote 30 years ago in The Vision of the Anointed, on the left’s sustained attack on “The Generic ‘He:’”
Trivial as such crusades may seem, they have been very successful in changing the way people talk in the media, in academia, and in government. Not only is the generic “he” taboo in many quarters, the speech controllers have pressed on to new conquests, attacking such words as “layman,” “craftsman,” “actress,” or “matron,” which violate their unisex view of the world, and also proscribe such phrases as “to master a language” because it uses a sex-specific word. These examples are from an official guidebook put out by the Australian government, which shows how far such crusades have spread. An American guidebook, distributed internationally, declares that there is “a perfectly scientific, completely foolproof, and highly theoretical model for avoiding sexism on the job.” As so often happens, pretensions of “science” are the last refuge of those who offer neither the evidence nor the logic that are integral to science.
The net effect of all this is that young women, especially in educational institutions where they are bombarded with radical feminist propaganda, are led to believe that every use of the generic “he” in books of the past is proof of disdain or hostility toward women, when in fact such usage simply avoided cluttering up the language or forcing writers into strained constructions and awkward phrases. In short, the anointed are helped to make yet another group feel like victims and to regard the anointed as their rescuers.
At the conclusion of her 10-minute suborbital jaunt, CBS’s Gayle King gushed, “You look down at the planet and you think that’s where we came from? To me it’s such a reminder about how we need to do better, be better.”
Indeed — excellent advice for Jemison to take to heart.
