How Roget’s Thesaurus Reflected Racism, Classism, and Colonial Power.
Peter Mark Roget, the inventor of the Thesaurus was inspired by the father of white supremacy Johann Blumenbach. Blumenbach created “scientific racism” and the term “Caucasian.” Roget sought to place words in terms of greater intellectual levels as opposed to the street talk of London at the time (1805-1852). Unfortunately, Roget supported the racist colonial empire of England and reinforced entries in his book that smelled of racism. For example, when studying the word “Nobility” he associated opposite words that also stunk of classism. Opposite the word Nobility was “scum, nobody, savage, barbarian, uncivilized, and other negative terms that provided a bad characterization of the lower classes and people of color that England had oppressed or conquered.
Malcolm X Discovery in Prison
In the words for “True Faith,” he put Christianity, and as opposites put “heathen, Paganism, Judaism, bigot, and fanatic.” Worse yet, aside from his religious bigotry, he used white supremacy and described “Blackness” as “negro, nocturnal, denigrate, Ethiopian, and terms that degraded Black people. This is what Malcom X discovered while in prison, of how the English language itself is filled with the racism of white supremacists and how Peter Mark Roget was part and parcel of this scheme to load the English language up with racist and degrading terms. He added the wealthy class of people as being the only good people by defining “Natures Nobleman” as “White Man,” while the word “Black” included “evil, horrible, vile,” and others in the grouping of “Badness.”
Over 30 million copies of this hidden racist scheme were sold by the end of the 20th Century. Roget’s scheme was to create a “superior” language of the upper-class white men. He tried to make the English language the “most intelligent language” in the world by putting down “slang” and colloquialisms that are bound by culture. Today, some of this trend is being refuted as slangs and new words are added to official dictionaries. These taboos are not subject to the criticism that they once were. The word “ain’t” and others are fully accepted as words that have usage in a cultural and social context. Good this has happened, or “cool” I would add.
Made Them Look ‘Ignorant’
Roget wrote his Thesaurus with hatred in mind of the Irish street people and the darker skinned people that vended their wares on the street corners in England in the 1800s. His goal was to make wealthy white men the language kings of Europe and the world. One should note that correcting someone’s English may in fact be a foolish attempt to bind yourself to the dictums of a language supremacist. Roget sought to control the “Lower Classes” by making them look ignorant when they did not speak the “Kings English.” In this way they sought to force English, a specific type, upon non-Europeans and Europeans of a “lower class.” It is indeed amazing how white supremacy poisoned the world in many different ways that are now hidden or masked so that you may never become aware (WOKE) of long-term denigration of people across time.
Roget’s Thesaurus helped pave the way for racist terms like “darkest Africa, barbarous lands, pagan lands, savage lands, savage people,” and others in reference to the people of the southern hemisphere. This geographical hatred furthered the aims of European domination of people in Asia, Africa and South America. The negative terms helped to justify murder, ethnocide, and genocide across the globe without us even associating the words used to create white terrorism. The ability to put negative words into the mouths of others was essential in demonizing people of color.
