Re: Racism

Scripsit Brian M. Scott:

No, these days "racism" is a general-purpose curse word
that has no denotation; it expresses its user's strongly
emotional disapproval of something.

Depends very much on who's using it;

Not any more. As soon as a word has been widely taken into curse use, it becomes virtually impossible to use it in any other way, except perhaps in limited circles, such as scholars who can really agree on using such a word as a term.

The same applies to praise words, of course. You cannot use the word "democratic" to convey a meaning (denotation), since the connotations are so strong due to the ubiquous use of the word to express just one's approval of some political system or movement.

I know a fair number of
people, myself included, who haven't even generalized it as
far as Joachim suggests.

You still cannot use the word "racism" without being understood as expressing just your disapproval of something. You can decide what you mean by a word, but you cannot decide how people take it. When 99 out of 100 people use "racism" as a curse word, how could the listener or reader know what you, the 100th person, want to mean by it? If you take the trouble of explaining it, you might just as well express yourself using the words in the explanation and dispense with "racism", if only for the simple reason that it is a loaded word that would add nothing to your message but could seriously mislead people.

I guess sometimes the problem is that people want to use the word _both_ as a content word _and_ as a curse word. You don't want to use objective expressions, perhaps in the fear of being taken as a racist. After all, condemning racism is part of the common liturgy in many circles. (I mean liturgy in a figurative sense, which is however not very far from its religious meaning.)

Besides, if you use objective expressions, you typically need to be explicit. Would you refer to _opinions_ about the existence of human races (even such opinions are regarded as racism by some), or about the differences between human races, or about some races being inferior or superior, or perhaps to _deeds_ (or willingness to deeds) that try to keep races separate, or discriminate on the basis of (assumed) race, or injure or kill people because of their race? What people originally wanted to do when they started to use "racism" as a curse word is to lump all this together, postulating or claiming that if you (for example) even _think_ of the possibility that differences in average intelligence between races might exist (and be a matter of empiric studies rather than moral premises), you inevitably end up with killing people of a wrong race. Such use of the word was useful for some purposes once - though I don't regard it as ethically acceptable propaganda - but it lost its usefulness when "racism" become such a vague word that you might be called a racist just (e.g.) because you said something about race, ethnicity, language, age, sex, profession, or something else in a tone that someone else finds wrong.

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

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