Think Twice Before Throwing Around the “R” Word

The term “Racism” is a loaded one, and for good reason too: racism has legitimately tainted the brunt of America’s history.  There’s no denying the struggles of enslavement to lynching to civil rights today.  It is true that at least to some extent, the shadow of racism lingers on, deeply – perhaps too deeply.

While researching, I recently encountered a study on racial attitudes from White Americans on people of color entitled “Crime and the Racial Fears of White Americans.” Research methodology aside, I discovered one word that the scholars used consistently, and even defined, in a way that’s highly problematic: the term “prejudice.” The scholars defined the word “prejudice” in a very sly but misleading way, and put that definition in the paper’s abstract: prejudice is “opposition to school and neighborhood integration.”  In this case, prejudice, which is inherently a negative term, is associated not with attitudes towards Blacks but attitudes towards a policy that impacts Blacks.  This use of the term “prejudiced Whites” is repeated throughout the article despite the fact that Whites could be, and are, opposed to forced integration policy for reasons that have nothing to do with race (for example, that it is an overreach of federal authority, because it wastes money, etc.).

The use, and implementation of blanket negative descriptors even to people and situations that don’t embody those descriptors has always been a problem, but recently, in today’s politics of outrage, this problem has been amplified via the blanket (and entirely inappropriate) overuse of the word “racism.”  In 2013, Guardian author and progressive Reniqua Allen implored her readers to stop throwing around the term “racist” to call out merely insensitive actions and word.  “Racism” causes White Americans to lash out defensively, she admits, but often justifiably – because their actions are overwhelmingly not constitutive of actual racism.  Wearing a sombrero at a party might be insensitive to Latino students, but they’re not embodying Richard Spencer.

In fact, Allen goes on to argue that incessant calling out of people for racism actually harms achieving racial justice.  By attacking scapegoats, the liberal community risks alienating the very people who they want to help fight with them against the threats of real racism, says Allen.

Since 2013, however, Allen’s warning to liberals hasn’t gone very far.  The poorly titled Atlantic article in 2016, “The Cost of Balancing Academia and Racism,” makes this error an unfathomable amount of times, such as in this quote: “research has shown that the higher-education experience often requires that black students employ even more grit than their white peers if they want to achieve both in the classroom and outside of it, where they have to overcome stereotype threat and straight-up racism.”  What is, may I ask, “straight-up racism?”  She never defines it.  She doesn’t want to, because the trick of it all is that hardball words like “racism” are enough to express the outrage she wants to express – at the expense of precision of language.

It’s sad that journalists resort to the shoehorning of language in order to force their narrative.  Consider even this article by PBS’ journalist Sean McElwee on “The Hidden Racism of Young White Americans.”   What this article actually accomplishes is not much more than a haphazard, sad conflation of statistics showing mere racial bias (such as “Black people are lazier than Whites,”) and statements that reflect possibly idealistic but certainly not racist worldviews (such as “Blacks face little Discrimination”) in a portion of the White populace.  And yet the label expressed by the title?  Racism.  Attitudes that may be merely race-neutral, or cynical at worst, are hereby classified as racist.  The widespread bait-and-switch going on with progressive rhetoric surrounding race has infected the supposedly highest arbiters of public information, or should I say, misinformation.

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