Way back in 2016 I wrote on the Fahrenheit211 site about how the word ‘racist’ had been overused and inappropriately used to such an extent that to all intents and purposes it was having less and less impact. In this article, which can be found here https://www.fahrenheit211.net/2016/07/06/the-overuse-of-the-word-racist/ I posited the idea that it was maybe time to reclaim the word ‘racialist’ to describe the act of judging a person by the colour of their skin. I suggested this word change on the grounds that the word ‘racist’ had been used so many times by the Left to describe actions and words that were not based on race but instead were used to categorise actions and words that were clearly based on a dislike of a culture or an ideology.
I said:
‘Racist’ was once a useful word and a powerful one but has lost a lot of power due to its overuse. Just as swear words shock when you first hear them, after a while, if they are used too frequently, become meaningless conversational punctuations.
The overuse and degradation of the word ‘racist’ is a bad thing. There are some occasions when this word is justified and may accurately describe a person or an action. Now however it’s become almost meaningless. It’s become just a mouth-noise emitted by Lefties and by the followers of Islam to either try to shut up a conversation that ain’t going their way, or to smear someone.
There are people out there who make snap judgements on the basis of skin colour when such a judgement would be unjustified. At one point calling such a person ‘racist’ would have been both justified and would have had an impact if not on the individual themselves then on those who were associated with that person. Now I look online and accusations from the Left that a person is ‘racist’ is falling on increasingly deaf ears. It’s not a word that is having the impact it once did. We can all see how it is being used as a ‘snarl word’ or a smear and that’s especially the case when the person whom this smear is being directed at is clearly not a person who makes judgements on the basis of a person’s skin colour. Time and time again these days I see leftists screaming ‘racist’ at people online and the objects of this leftist hate turning around and saying ‘so what?’. Twenty years ago a person who was accused of being a ‘racist’, especially if there was no grounding in that accusation would have protested volubly and forcefully, now they see the accusation as an empty one and is now just, as I said back in 2016, an empty ‘mouth noise’ from lefties and Islamists who just want to shut down a conversation.
Because of the actions of the Left and their Islamist friends we are now in a position where a word that might one day be really needed to describe a particular political movement or a person will be used but it will have no power, nobody will listen to whoever is speaking it. It will have no power because it has been so often inappropriately used and there’s nobody to blame for that word being neutered than the political Left and their friends.