We Should All Be Anti-Racism Writers

Are you sick of racism yet?

I don’t mean sick of talking about it — I mean sick of it being. Every single white person I know has heard the same things I’ve heard: racist remarks that demean another culture, race, or religion. I’ve heard it since I was first able to comprehend what was being said. It colors everything. It divides from a young age to be hearing people saying stuff or repeating stories that confirm their bias — that this race is terrible and that our race needs to be careful.

Fear. It’s about using fear to control the narrative. And I for one am ready for it to end.

Alas, we have larger forces at work that will never quit spinning the rhetoric that will keep us at odds with each other. There are people who have chosen to use those tropes as an excuse to behave like imbeciles with abandon. When we have someone to despise, it’s easier to hold ourselves up as “better.” But honey, better isn’t had by treating others as inferiors. And there you are, calling yourself a Christian….

But I digress.

My writer friend  Sharon Hurley Hall is an anti-racism writer. She’s devoted her career to promoting equity and inclusion. Shouldn’t we all?

With that question in my head, I’ve made a conscious decision to incorporate an anti-racism approach to my writing.  As I mentioned in last month’s post on this topic, we writers are well-equipped to change things from our chairs. In some ways, that’s a power many other people do not have. We have pulpits, and we have the ability to rephrase things so that we ourselves are not propagating the same micro-aggressions that are just continuing the racist narrative.

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I’m going to try making this a monthly topic only because paying it lip service doesn’t seem right to me. It’s high time we all start delving into our own habits and behaviors, and looking at where we might be adding to the problem.

Today, let’s talk about language.

Since we’re writers, words are our business. And every writer knows — or should — that the right word matters. So does the wrong word. For example, here are some commonly used phrases:

• Inner city
• Gentrification

I picked those two because early on in my writing career, they both leapt off the page at me. Not because I like them, either. The connotation in each case is the problem.

Inner city is used to describe the poorer sections of a city. It implies social and economic problems. And damn if it isn’t often linked directly with descriptions of people being from “the rough part of town.” Yes, there are rough parts of every town. But not all rough parts are black. Nor are they necessarily “rough” if black people live there. Let’s not use euphemisms to cover up a racist remark.

Gentrification is a word I’ve loathed for a while. It means wealthier people moving into poorer neighborhoods, basically displacing the people who live there. The alternate definition is this: “the process of making someone or something more refined, polite, or respectable.” (Definition from the Oxford Dictionaries) And again, it promotes the idea that black people or Hispanic people somehow live in substandard conditions, and need white people to move in and “rescue” them. The last episode (arguably, the entire last season) of Shameless addressed gentrification and its impact on the people in a neighborhood that is slowly gentrified.

So how can we talk about an area without using these terms?

Inner city: Urban area

Gentrification: changing demographic

Frankly, I don’t see any reason to use the word gentrification. But if you must, keep it generic and free of anything that suggests that the people moving into the area are somehow better than the people living there.

Writers, what charged words or phrases are you noticing? How can you reword them to be less racially charged?