An email I sent to reporter Lynn Sweet in response to a post she made on Politics Daily on why Obama should appoint a woman to the Supreme Court:

I’m writing to you about a phrasing that you wrote in the lead to your SCOTUS post. The lead to your article reads: “So a new Gallop poll shows “no clamor” for President Obama to select a woman or minority to the Supreme Court vacancy being created by the departure of Justice David Souter.”

Your lead calls to mind an old book entitled _But Some Of Us Are Brave: All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men_.

The point in this title is that not all women are white, that there are minority women too, and those women get elided when we write about “women” and “minorities” as separate categories. Now, I recognize that you are simply parroting the language of the Gallup Poll headline. And I also recognize that having to differentiate the numerous possible identity categories is cumbersome. In addition, I recognize that you are not the only one guilty of this conceptualization. Nonetheless, I encourage you to be thoughtful about your phrasing since language does matter.

Last, I chose not to post this in the comment section because of the abundance of anti-feminist sentiments that appear there and I didn’t want my comment lost in the noise.

Thank you for listening.

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