On May 25, 2020, Derek Chauvin, a Minneapolis police officer, murdered George Perry Floyd, Jr., a Black man accused of passing a counterfeit $20 bill at a nearby grocery store. A seventeen-year-old witness, Darnella Frazier, used her cell phone to film the full 8 minutes and 46 seconds of Chauvin’s brutal placement of his knee on the neck of a compliant and unresisting Floyd, as well as the complicity of three other police officers who either assisted Chauvin or prevented other witnesses from intervening. Posting the video on social media, Frazier helped to ignite worldwide protests against “systemic racism” and “white supremacy,” two phrases that resounded throughout the mainstream media coverage of the protests.

Floyd’s callous murder was of course not the first such incident to inspire outrage and protest. But the magnitude of the protests, which were global as well as racially and generationally diverse, suggested a sea change. Pundits speculated about the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on the protests. The pandemic had already illuminated, once again, the disproportionate impact—in terms of both health and economics—on communities of color. And the soaring unemployment rates and several months of sheltering in place had yielded an angry and restless population with both time and opportunity to demonstrate. More than that, however, the pandemic stopped the usual forms of social, economic, and political intercourse in a way that suddenly made change inevitable. The crisis was certainly a turning point, and change had to happen. The protests were an expression of hope as well as frustration and outrage, as individuals came together to influence the direction of that change.

This upswell of attention to the public health threat of police violence in the wake of the pandemic and, more directly, Floyd’s murder led many to describe “twin pandemics” or the “two public health crises” of COVID-19 and racism, a framing that circulated widely through medical literature as well as the mainstream media (e.g., Abdul-Jabbar 2020; “Readers Share” 2020). But, as the analysis emerging from the Black Lives Matter movement has made clear, these are not separate threats: the disproportionately high morbidity and mortality rates in communities of color are a manifestation of structural racism. The analysis emerging from the Black Lives Matter movement has shown how addressing the deep roots of anti-Black violence in all of its manifestations will lead to far-ranging social reforms in health care, education, economics, and the environment on a scale that will benefit all currently (and historically) disadvantaged groups and, in so doing, bequeath a better world for all.

Photo by steven.eason

Indeed, analyses of novel diseases dating back at least to the late 1980s have persuasively identified development practices worldwide—and globalization generally—as fostering the conditions that produce outbreaks and that turn those outbreaks into pandemics. Those practices register the legacies of racial colonialism and racial capitalism. Addressing structural racism is crucial for creating a more equitable world. It will, moreover, help us prevent outbreaks, help us keep outbreaks from becoming pandemics, and help us live more effectively with the diseases we fail to prevent.

Addressing structural racism is, of course, a multifaceted and multiscalar endeavor. It is not surprising that woman-of-color feminism has laid the groundwork for an analysis emerging from a movement inaugurated by three Black women. In the brief essay that follows, we draw on that work to explore the importance of the shifting vocabulary during the pandemic—the subtle adoption of phrases such as “systemic racism” and “white supremacy” as the lingua franca of mainstream media—that has gone largely unremarked, as well as Merriam-Webster Dictionary’s redefinition of racism, that we believe at once registers and is crucial for the project of addressing structural racism.

The changing vocabulary of racism

In May 2020, Kennedy Mitchum, a 22-year-old Black woman living near Ferguson, Missouri, and active participant in the Black Lives Matter protests, wrote to Merriam-Webster about the inadequacy of their dictionary’s definition of racism as “a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.” That definition, she contended, allowed too many people to dismiss the violence of structural (or systemic) racism. “I kept having to tell them that definition is not representative of what is actually happening in the world,” she explained in an interview with CNN. “The way that racism occurs in real life is not just prejudice it’s the systemic racism that is happening for a lot of black Americans” (quoted in Williams 2020).

In 1967, Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton famously distinguished between individual racism (clear expressions of explicit racism) and institutional racism, which they found exemplified in the vast disparity between infant mortality rates in the Black and white communities of Birmingham, Alabama (Carmichael and Hamilton 1967). “Institutional” racism has subsequently been broadened to “structural” (or, in recent media usages, “systemic”) racism to name how racial inequities are perpetuated not only through institutions but through every facet of a culture.[1] Weary of the difficulty of explaining the difference to her interlocutors, Kennedy recognized the importance of language in shaping understanding, hence turned her attention to the dictionary. To even her surprise, after a series of email exchanges, she persuaded Merriam-Webster to change the definition. While the spokesperson for Merriam-Webster, Peter Sokolowski, contended that the issue of structural racism was already a part of Merriam-Webster’s definition, he conceded it was not the primary definition. And, he added, crediting Mitchum for spurring a change that “would not have been made without [her] persistence,” it could be “express[ed] more clearly to bring the idea of an asymmetrical power structure into the language of this definition” (quoted in Williams 2020).

Mitchum’s insight manifested what Patricia Hill Collins calls the perspective of “the outsider within,” where “outsider” refers to the member of a group that has been marginalized by or excluded entirely from a power structure. In her magisterial 1986 essay, “Learning From the Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought,” Collins describes the importance of that perspective to advance thinking in disciplines and society at large. Drawing on her experience as a Black feminist sociologist, she explains “the special perspective” that “Black women who remain rooted in their own experiences as Black women” can bring “to some of the fundamental issues facing society itself” (Collins 1986, S29). The “outsider within” status affords a “creative tension” that “sensitizes [outsiders] to patterns that may be more difficult for established sociology insiders to see” (S29). Drawing on the anthropologist Leith Mullings’s definition of culture as “the symbols and values that create the ideological frame of reference through which people attempt to deal with the circumstances in which they find themselves,” she broadens the disciplinary insight into the assertion that “Black women’s culture may help provide the ideological frame of reference—namely, the symbols and values of self-definition and self-valuation—that assist Black women in seeing the circumstances shaping race, class, and gender oppression” (S22). While the idea that the “outsider” might have a uniquely insightful perspective on cultural beliefs, forms, and biases was not new—it is indeed a hallmark of early sociology, as in the work of such early sociologists as W.E.B. Du Bois, Georg Simmel, and Robert Park—Collins builds on the work of a range of Black feminists as she notes the “recurring theme” of “attention to the interlocking nature of race, gender, and class oppression … in [their] works …” (S19).  Chandra Talpade Mohanty makes an analogous point in her 2003 “‘Under Western Eyes’ Revisited: Feminist Solidarity through Anticapitalist Struggles” when she demonstrates the unique critical importance of the perspective of women of “the two-thirds world,” since “capitalism utilizes the raced and sexed bodies of women in its search for profit globally, and…it is often the experiences and struggles of poor women of color that allow the most inclusive analysis as well as politics in antiglobalization struggles” (Mohanty 2003, 530).

In her request that Merriam-Webster revise the definition of racism, Mitchum has worked to alter “the ideological frame of reference” of US culture and beyond. While neither the word nor the concept of racism would have been available to Noah Webster—although he distinctly manifested the bias—Mitchum’s request is nonetheless, perhaps ironically, in the spirit of his project, which Webster understood would both codify the English language as it worked in the United States and shape it.[2] For him, the American Revolution required new definitions, since, as he explains in the dictionary’s preface, “language is the expression of ideas” (Webster 1828, n.p.). New concepts, he contends, emerge from new experiences, and they require vocabulary changes. A dictionary is not only a reflection of ideas, but also a driver of them: among the aims of its public work, for Webster, was to “be a guide to the youth of the United States” (n.p.). Language is invariably political. The dictionary change inspired by Mitchum’s request reflects not only an understanding of the structural nature of racism, which the Black Lives Matter protests have helped to make more widely recognizable, but also a recognition of the dictionary’s work as a political document that creates or inhibits the propagation of conversations about the structure of US society and beyond.

The changes in the dictionary definition are part of a broader formal shift in the language of race and racism occasioned by the transforming cultural climate during the pandemic. Major media outlets, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Associated Press, have all changed their style guides to capitalize the word Black to refer to “a shared cultural identity,” as the New York Times puts it (Coleman 2020). Explaining that the Times was making the grammatical change in response to the George Floyd protests, culture reporter Nancy Coleman notes that nearly a century had passed since the last such initiative: a letter-writing campaign, started by Du Bois, “asking publications, including The Times, to capitalize the N in Negro,” since, he charged, “‘The use of a small letter for the name of twelve million Americans and two hundred million human beings,’…was ‘a personal insult’” (Coleman 2020).[3] Although the Times declined his request in 1926, four years later they made the change, recognizing the disrespect inherent in their typography.

These changes, as well as the mainstream media’s widespread use of “white supremacy” to name the expression of white racism generally (not just the explicit racism of white nationalists) and its use of “systemic racism,” attest to a growing awareness of the inherent violence of the structural nature of racism. Nevertheless, a new word, phrase, or grammatical adjustment signals no more than the beginning of a new awareness; it does not imply imminent change. It is therefore particularly important, especially when there has been a rapid shift, to understand what has inspired it and what to expect. Writing from within the moment, it is difficult to say with any certainty exactly why the time seemed right for the broadening insight into the structural nature of racism, and it is of course not possible to predict the directions change will take, but once again we find valuable insights in our feminist past. Meaningful change is difficult, painful, slow, and often violent, as our life experiences—and feminist pasts—have taught us. As we seek to understand what is happening around us, we draw on the widely varied but nonetheless collective experiences of that past.

Photo by Rasande Tyskar

Moving forward       

There are many factors that can explain the broadening of insights with which feminists, critical race theorists, queer and trans theorists, and others have struggled for decades. Change does not come easily; the powerful do not readily relinquish their hold. As Audre Lorde cautioned the participants in the Second Sex Conference at New York University, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” (Lorde 1983, 99). Reminding them that “racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time,” she urged each member of the audience to “reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there” (101).

All who came into the streets and faced the multiple dangers of state violence and COVID-19, and all who could not go out but supported the protests in other ways, took the first important step of collective action. But, as our history shows us, that is where the difficult work begins. Although writing in a markedly different context—the West Coast Women’s Music Festival in Yosemite National Forest—Bernice Johnson Reagon summarized the painful work of coalition building with the uncannily apt metaphor of breathlessness: “There is a lesson in bringing people together where they can’t get enough oxygen,” she mused, “then having them try to figure out what they’re going to do when they can’t think properly” (Johnson Reagon 1983, 356). Drawing out the graphic metaphor, she distinguishes between the women from high altitudes who have the conditioning not to be bothered by the thin Yosemite air and those “who have not had the environmental conditioning,” a group to which she belongs. “I feel as if I’m going to keel over any minute and die,” she says, but it is not only a complaint. “That is often what it feels like if you’re really doing coalition work. Most of the time you feel threatened to the core and if you don’t, you’re not really doing no coalescing…. You don’t go into coalition because you just like it. The only reason you would consider teaming up with somebody who could possibly kill you, is because that’s the only way you can figure you can stay alive” (356-67).

Distinguishing between coalition and home, Johnson Reagon explains you don’t go to a coalition for comfort or to feel good; you stay home for that. “Coalition work is not work done in your home. Coalition work has to be done in the streets. And it is some of the most dangerous work you can do” (Johnson Reagon 1983, 359). Her artful interplay between the literal and metaphorical are prescient—and, again, uncannily apt in our moment. Pointing to the rise of technology and its ability to connect us in unprecedented ways, she underscores how the rapidly globalizing world has forced us out of our homes—literally and figuratively—as homogeneous villages have given way to the heterogeneous public spaces through which we now move. Both she and Lorde insist on the interdependency that brings with it the confrontation with, and terror of, difference and the intense response through which power and privilege—in the forms of whiteness, masculinity, and heterosexuality—struggle to maintain their hold.

But movements and coalitions bring wide-scale change—and not just the changes people who get involved are expecting. “There were people who came to work in the [civil rights] movement who were not Black,” Johnson Reagon explains: “Most of them were white when they came. Before it was over that category broke up—you know, some of them were Jewish, not simply white, and some others even changed their names. Say if it was Mary when they came South, by the time they were finished it was Maria, right? It’s called finding yourself. At some point you cannot be fighting oppression and be oppressed yourself and not feel it” (1983, 363). The observation once again confirms what the Black Lives Matter movements have also contended: once we begin to recognize and address the structural violence of oppression in one place, it gradually expands into the dismantling—and rebuilding—that Lorde describes.

We cannot stay in our homes forever, Johnson Reagon cautions, again with uncanny prescience. And indeed, the terms through which we need to recognize how to build coalition and learn to live more justly together—confronting the terror of difference and the inequities we perpetuate out of fear as well as greed—are the same terms that will allow us to begin to live more judiciously in our environments and with our dangerous microbes. The vocabulary changes suggest a first step in the processes of recognition that can move us toward coalition. But we would do well to keep in mind the cautionary tales of our feminist history and wise words of these prescient analyses. Johnson Reagon concludes with a warning that may help us move forward: “you can do wonderful things in a crisis…. You go beyond yourself …, and you talk about it for years…. You go wishing every day was like that. Everyday ain’t like that, and what really counts is not what you do this weekend, but take what this weekend has meant—try to digest it. And first thing Monday, Tuesday morning at work, before twenty-four hours go around, apply it. And then do it everyday you get up and find yourself alive” (1983, 368).

Read the other symposium essays

References

Abdul-Jabbar, Kareem. 2020. “Don’t Understand the Protests? What You’re Seeing Is People Pushed to the Edge.” Los Angeles Times, May 30. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-05-30/dont-understand-the-protests-what-youre-seeing-is-people-pushed-to-the-edge

Carmichael, Stokely, and Charles V. Hamilton. 1967. Black Power: The Politics of Black Liberation in America. New York: Random House.

Coleman, Nancy. 2020. “Why We’re Capitalizing Black.” New York Times, July 5. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/05/insider/capitalized-black.html.

Collins, Patricia Hill. 1986. “Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought.” Social Problems 33(6): S14-30.

Johnson Reagon, Bernice. 1983. “Coalition Politics: Turning the Century.” In Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, ed. Barbara Smith, 356-68. New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press.

Lorde, Audre. 1983. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, ed. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, 98-101. New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press.

Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 2003. “‘Under Western Eyes’ Revisited: Feminist Solidarity Through Anticapitalist Struggles.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28(2):499-535.

“Readers Share How They’re Coping During the Twin Pandemics: Racism and Coronavirus.” 2020. Boston Globe, June 13. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/06/13/opinion/hit-hard-by-events-these-weeks/.

Tharps, Lori L. 2014. “I Refuse to Remain in the Lower Case.” My American Melting Pot, June 2. https://myamericanmeltingpot.com/2014/06/02/i-refuse-to-remain-in-the-lower-case/

Webster, Noah. 1828. “Preface.” An American Dictionary of the English Language. 2 Vol. New York: S. Converse.

Williams, David. 2020. “Missouri Woman Asked Merriam-Webster to Update Its Definition of Racism and Now Officials Will Make the Change.” CNN, June 12. https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/09/us/dictionary-racism-definition-update-trnd/index.html.

Notes

[1] We would distinguish the word systemic, which tends to describe current configurations, from structural, the term we prefer, which is more generally used to also account for the ways historical structures of racism shape the present.

[2] “It has been my aim of this work, now offered to my fellow citizens, to ascertain the true principles of the language,” Webster writes in the preface, “to purify it from some palpable errors…and in this manner, to furnish a standard of our vernacular tongue, which we shall not be ashamed to bequeath to three hundred millions of people who are destined to occupy, and I hope, to adorn the vast territory within our jurisdiction” (Webster 1828, n.p.). Language is, of course, never neutral, and Webster manifestly had his own political goals for the dictionary, which included the settler colonialism that would displace and do violence to Native tribes across the continent.

[3] It is interesting to note that others have laid the groundwork for this typographic change, but it is only now that it has become conventional in the mainstream media. See, for example, Tharps (2014).