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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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