I picked up my blue and red, beaten up copy of Merriam- Webster and flipped to page 328 where the word “racism” was.
How nice it would be to take an eraser and remove this word from every copy, every edition, every page 328 of every Merriam- Webster’s dictionary.
Would the word go away if I could do that?
Would the conservation of ink that would no longer be needed somehow help to permanently delete this word from the minds of the world as well?
I’d like to think eliminating this word from print would make it go away, but we all know that just because something isn’t pressed into the delicate fibers of sheets upon sheets of paper doesn’t mean that it still isn’t out there, engrained into the part of our brains that picks up vocabulary the way an infant learns how to speak.
Words like racism live on inside the minds of people,
not just on paper.
The more we say the word aloud, let our tongues create the formation that’s necessary to produce the sound that is a product from this combination of vowels and consonants, the more we make it real.
If one person can remove it from their speech, and urge one more person to follow their lead, perhaps over time the word- and the act- can be gone completely.
But it takes more than just not saying “racism” and it’s various forms, it takes consciously stopping yourself from using any color as a description of someone.
Why does it have to be a black man?
Why does someone have to a white woman?
Remove the word racism from your mouth and it’ll fade from your brain; remove descriptors from a person and they’re no longer a depiction, they’re just a person.
Just a man.
Just a woman.
Just a human being living, breathing, and sharing this land that we all call
home.