Really? Plenty of my friends on social media and a few work colleagues state their pronouns, but I've never even remotely felt that I need to.
Is it perhaps that you are quite suggestible?
I guess that's a way to see the basic tension there: some folks might argue that using scapegoats can help society move on, while others might object on the basis that the goat wasn't actually evil.
Alternatively, we can see switching away from the word "Negro" as a rebranding effort, to retire prior literature and reduce historical associations.
Either way.. I guess that what can seem weird about such social-engineering maneuvers is that they don't make any sense if we assume that people are ideal logical-thinkers; mechanically, they're more like side-channel attacks or emotional manipulation. And.. I guess folks might vary in how agreeable they might find well-intentioned emotional-manipulation.
Right, but in this particular instance what actually happened is that we just moved on by building consensus around a new paradigm. No one uses the word anymore, and nothing awful happened.
Therefore I argue that similar hand wringing about gender pronouns is going to turn out equally bland. It's fine. Just relax. Society isn't falling apart, you're just being socially awkward. And in fifty years everyone will think the antiwoke conservatives were just being ridiculous.
At the same time.. not everyone wants to have to play along. A lot of new identity-trends emerge (and reemerge over time and in different places), giving adherents ways to self-conceptualize who they are as well as rules for how to interact with others. Some trends get really popular and can get a lot of true-believers, while others don't really get into them.
Can you understand how both sides feel? This is, can you understand both what it'd feel like to be someone deeply invested in the latest trend in spirituality, and can you likewise understand what it'd feel like to want to give the latest trend in spirituality a pass?
If this is the first trend you've seen, then it may seem like this big, huge thing that everyone should adopt. But you ask about 50-years from now? ..that's a long time for a trend to remain relevant, even if you're currently in a sub-culture that's super into it.
And that was prior civil war, when he advocated against slavery. Which, quite a few people argued is a good thing.
> The form of the negro —[I use the term negro, precisely in the sense that you use the term Anglo Saxon; and I believe, too, that the former will one day be as illustrious as the latter] [...]
Would you happen to recall where you may've seen Douglass complaining about it?
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1: Frederick Douglass, "The claims of the Negro, ethnologically considered", 1854-07-12. PDF-page 16: https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/rbc/rbaapc/079...
Being required to, say, share drinking fountains or pools with people of another race should not be compared to this. One is about allowing people to co-exist with you, the other is about complying with a strongly encouraged communal display of ideology. There are obvious comparisons to make but you can use your imagination about what those are.