Language Matters

I don’t like when we compare racism to a pandemic, virus, or illness. I hear a lot of that these days.

— This can potentially deflect some of the responsibility for racism. We are building this. We are complicit in this. We do spread it in some ways, no doubt, but we do it quite actively (even if sometimes, subconsciously).

— But even more, when we make this comparison, we are co-opting the language of pandemic, virus, illness, and disability and using it as the symbol to name something as morally evil. In our language, we make associations between illness and moral failing all the time. This increases stigma.

Racism is evil. It is systemic.

It’s something different than an illness.

–Renee Roederer