Language evolves and changes. Words get worn down over time, or drift and find new meanings. Old word stop meaning what they used to. Or sometimes our understanding of words changes, and what was acceptable becomes fraught, for reasons serious or silly.
That said, I'm always a bit leery of intentional efforts to change the language. And when someone suggests it as reflecting a less biased way of using the language, even as they are changing the emotional content of the words to something that conveys an intentionally different (and more vivid) message … red flags start waving in my brain.
Prof. Landis' proposals here may be where the historic / academic language is headed, but I'm not sure I buy it at this point.
For example, I don't find "slave-owner" to be "legitimizing" anything; swapping it out for "enslaver" feels like it is describing something different — a more active role in something that may have been simply a horrid status quo. Passively owning and profiting from slaves may not be any more morally defensible than actively managing and acquiring them, but there seems to me to be a difference between someone who purchases — directly or indirectly — a human being who is already a slave, and someone who brings someone into slavery, the latter of which is what properly an "enslaver" (or even just "slaver") is.
One could argue that turning the newborn of slaves into slaves themselves was active enslavement. But I think it makes the horrifying institution of human chattel slavery into something different than what it was.
Similarly, calling plantations "slave labor camps" doesn't feel like precisely the same thing as, say, the slave labor camps of the Third Reich (where the labor was rented out to a variety of owners but still retained in centralized prisons, as opposed to being owned and housed and used to purpose by a particular owner). That doesn't mean they were any better, to be sure, but the distinction seems a worthwhile one. If "plantation" has associations that feel dismayingly romantic and innocent, perhaps it's better to remind folk of the foulness that underlay the stately colonnaded mansions, like vermin under a rock, not to change the word being used.
Indeed, it seems to me that rather than simply discarding the words through some sort of academic diktat, it would be better to draw comparisons and change the imagery associated with the disapproved words. What did it mean to be a slave-owner, and how did that role contribute to the perpetuation of human misery and torment? What comparisons can properly be made between the lives of the slaves of the antebellum southern plantations and what we would call their circumstances today? Use the words that were given at the time (and have been carried forward), but improve the accuracy of the factual and emotional implications of them, rather than seek out new and intentionally emotion-laden terms in their stead.
Changing language intentionally sometimes results in greater accuracy, but too often is used ideologically to advance an agenda. Better to illuminate and educate and let the implications of the truth behind the words come out, rather than roughshod try and mandate the correctly nuanced words to use. That may be a more difficult and less controllable process, but it avoids Orwellian implications that academics should, frankly, shun rather than embrace.
These Are Words Scholars Should No Longer Use to Describe Slavery and the Civil War
That article is New-Speak at it’s finest.