American English morphs naturally. It’s the reason for new editions of dictionaries. Americans though are impatient. We obsessively mutate our language. We utter new sounds, and the ring of those syllables asserts our societal mark, as if the ephemeral becomes ethereal with a new word. Etymologically, it’s okay. American English is flexible even though it probably didn’t feel that way in fourth grade. It changes rather quickly compared to most languages.
Regardless of how often that new sound is uttered, it can’t prolong the lifespan of the ephemeral. Their meanings are nebulous, twisting, twirling, and turning giving the sound expanded connotations with each utterance.
A time comes when we tire of their vagaries and we again listen.
New sounds resonate. The older ones sound tiny and fade in rhetorical atrophy.[1]
A new word of sorts has appeared. Anti-racist. The sound itself is not new. It’s a person who challenges racism and fights for racial tolerance. In other words, an activist. Think Martin Luther King, Jr.; Malcolm X; William DuBois; Shirley Chisholm; some may say John Brown; as well as dozens of others over the past 170 years.
The average person isn’t and never could be an activist. They don’t have the stuff. I don’t. An uncommon dedication and a moral focus drive these individuals. Activists plunge forward time and time again, struggling against persistent set-backs, over the course of a lifetime. These people are anti-racist. At least by definition.
I heard the word being used, and its meaning was twisted: Someone who is opposed to racism.
That’s silly.
A racist believes in the scientifically fraudulent concept of race, which was devised in the 19th Century by English, German, and American “scientists.” They weren’t proving their theory of race but were establishing a hierarchy of humans to justify enslavement, prolonged indentured labor, and imperialism as their God-given obligations, as in “The White Man’s Burden.” A racist therefore believes there is such a thing as race and that one, the white one, is superior to the others.
The racist is wrong on two counts.
He denies humanity of all people.[2]
By denying humanity, he denies himself—the ultimate in idiocy.
The opposite of racist is not anti-racist. It’s human being.
[1] Say the following aloud and listen to the fading tin: groovy, copasetic, phat, and soon-to-vanish fake news.
[2] It’s a notion more common in the world than most Americans presume.
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