Open Season for Racists

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Lexicon Valley Intro

0:30From Booksmart Studios, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language. I'm Mike Volo, joined this week by John McWhorter. If you plug the word racist into Google search trends, that's an online tool that tracks search data going back to 2004. If you plug in racist, you see spikes all throughout the past 20 plus years. But if you plug in the phrase openly racist, you see almost nothing prior to early 2016 when it really starts to take off.

1:04That coincides precisely with the beginning of the Trump era, when people who either define themselves or are defined by others as openly racist were suddenly empowered in a way that they arguably had not been for decades. And all of a sudden, the phrase was appearing in songs. How can your hands be blameless supporting a president openly racist administration? You could hear it in television shows. Yeah, yeah, okay, think about it. I mean, dating is the most openly racist and superficial thing we do as a society.

1:40It was all over the news. There has never been a president in American history who has been as so openly racist and divisive as this man. And it remains in frequent use today. So I called John McWhorter, Columbia University linguist and Lexicon Valley contributor,

Openly Racist Phrase

2:02to unpack openly racist. We started by talking about a column he had written for the New York Times in 2023, in which he himself had used the phrase. The title of the column was what the HBO show Southside teaches us. Southside was actually canceled about 10 seconds after I wrote that column. I almost feel like it was causal. But Southside was this remarkable sitcom that was about various Black people living in Southside,

2:34Chicago, with various orientations, various social classes, various goals, just trying to make it all work. And it was one part the Fridays movies or the barbershop movies, and frankly, one part Seinfeld. A lot of it was very comedy of manners, very in quotation marks. One part arrested development, lots of, you know, side conversations where there's a scene that's nominally about something else.

3:02And the word for today is success. Success. Success. Success. Success! Unfortunately, Gustav, you're two years late on your payment due to a lack of... Success! Wrong way, son. Very raunchy, very clever, very precise. I thought it was a really special show. And, of course, therefore, of course, the minute I say that I like it, it has to be yanked off the air. But language was amazing in it because it was fluent, modern, unfiltered Black English. Some of it clearly a little bit improvised.

3:34And so I just... It was a symphony just of Black English dialogue as well as everything else. Wrong way! Okay, you just mad because you can't swim. Oh. I said it. I can swim. No, you can't. Okay, you can't swim. I can swim, man. You can't swim. You can't doggy paddle. You can't hold your breath underwater. You can't do nothing. You almost drowned at a kid's party. It was very traumatic. And a clown had to jump in and save your life. And he came out the water with his regular face and scared all the kids. Okay, and you wrote a column about it. You wrote that too often, Black kids were placed in schools with openly racist white teachers and students.

4:08The phrase that jumps out at me is openly racist. The reason I put it that way was because, and all of this was subconscious on my part, but it was based on the way we carry on our debates about race and racism today, is that there is bigotry. There is racism, and we all know that that's the case. But especially since the 1960s, there's always been a looming and very thorny question as to whether some people will exaggerate about racism.

4:44Some people say that racism is completely over and they don't know why we're dredging that stuff up. And I think most of us understand that that's a rather blinkered view. But then in between that and thinking that racism is absolutely everything, which I don't think any but a fringe think, there's a kind of a controversy over is it racist or is it something else? Is it open bigotry or is it the kind of bigotry that a person doesn't realize that they harbor? These are some of the most unpleasant questions in our fabric today. So me writing in 2023 about the bigoted teachers and students who were actually using the N-word and not wanting to be in a pool with you, et cetera, in 1966 and 1967, I felt a need to say not just racist as in I'm saying that they have private racist feelings and don't know it.

5:35Because the truth is, at this point, in educated discourse, that's usually what we mean. We assume that the person we're calling racist would deny it if confronted with it, as opposed to, say, some Southern segregationist in 1920. So I need to say it's not the person who needs to be taught what white privilege is, but it's people who were actually bigots. Today, that needs to be qualified. It's not that it's 1966 and I say that somebody is subtly racist because most people are openly racist. Now I have to say these were bigots, not just people who need to read their Robin DiAngelo.

6:09So that's where I got that. The phrase openly racist is, I think, what we might call a retronym. In other words, there was such a musical instrument as a guitar and that existed for some number of, I don't know, hundreds of years. And suddenly, somebody plugged in that guitar to an amplifier and lo and behold, we had an electric guitar, right? And so now we had to distinguish the thing that you didn't plug in from the thing that you did. And so we came up with this term, acoustic guitar.

6:42Now, acoustic guitar is a retronym. No one would have said that in 1920. Like, nobody called it, this is World War I, right? Right. So the phrase acoustic guitar was coined retroactively to distinguish it from this term that came along later, electric guitar. And therefore, it's a retronym. And I think of openly racist as a retronym. The term racist had to have come before that. And at some point, we decided as a society that it was increasingly taboo to be publicly, overtly racist.

7:19And so we came up with this phrase that seems to have stuck and been used many, many times in the past, say, five, six, seven years. And that's openly racist. Would you agree as a linguist that we could call that a retronym? Yes. Yes, I know what you mean. And it's interesting. What I think we're documenting here is that the term racist has evolved, as terms often do. And terms often evolve to become less objective than subjective.

7:50And that's exactly what's happening here. Racist used to mean somebody running around using the N-word and not wanting to live in a neighborhood with black people. It's at the point where I think we can say that when we say racist, what we mean by default, what we mean really, usually, is someone who doesn't know that they're racist but is, someone who needs to be told that what they're doing is racist when they wouldn't have thought of it before. And so unintentionally racist or subliminally racist is what we mean by racist. That's part of why the word is so hard.

8:21And so now we're looking for a word to mean what it meant 50 years ago in the Archie Bunker time. And it's funny, usually I use bigotry for that. I figure, well, bigot, you know, there's no such thing as somebody who's an unintentional bigot. Bigot is somebody standing there with a beer who doesn't like black people. But another way of doing it, given that bigot is also slightly hoary, as in H-O-A-R-Y. Yeah, it's a little old-fashioned. Kind of like prejudiced. That's just not the current word. You say it openly racist because you need a way of saying that.

8:51Yes, that's true. But nobody would have needed to say openly racist while they were watching I Love Lucy because racism was just accepted. Yeah, that's an interesting way of putting it. Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money. Because behind every headline is a bottom line. Whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion-dollar swings, there's a money side to every story. And when you see the money side, you understand what others miss. Get the money side of the story.

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9:28Yeah, and you said the word racist itself used to mean, say, somebody who didn't want to live near black people in the 1960s. Yeah. That dovetails precisely with a very brief tale that I want to tell you that takes place in the late 1950s, early 1960s, which I think is right around when this term openly racist was entering the vocabulary of educated people, maybe. This takes place in a suburb of Chicago called Deerfield, Illinois.

10:02This is not a suburb in which the show Southside would have taken place, right? Deerfield, there were not many black people and probably none at all in early 1959, which is when a real estate company called the Progress Development Corporation, we'll just call them PDC. They bought two pieces of land in Deerfield and they got permission from the town to develop them, to build homes. Just to give you a sense of the scale that we're talking about here, one of the pieces of land was about 15 acres.

10:34It was called Floral Park and the other was seven acres. It was called Pear Tree, right? This is what people called sub-developments back then. Very much, yeah. And there was nothing on this land. It was, as real estate people like to say, it was unimproved, right? In other words, it was just land when this guy Max Weinrib from the PDC bought the sites and he started building homes, right? They got permits. They were digging foundations. They were framing up the model homes.

11:05They were planning to build about 50 houses in total. This was fully authorized, fully supported by what was called the Village Board in Deerfield. It was fully supported by the Planning Commission, by the school board.

Deerfield Housing Debate

11:19Up until November 11th, 1959, what happened on that day, you could probably guess, John, but I'll read to you from court documents at the time. The whole community was thrown into an uproar after November 11th, 1959, when it became known to the officials and citizens of Deerfield that some of the houses that PDC proposed to build would be sold to Negroes and other non-Caucasians.

11:50Construction on those sites was immediately halted. A week later, the Board of Trustees in Deerfield held a meeting. They said, the people are demanding that action be taken to maintain their property values and the social fabric of the village. I would argue that that's coded language. It's not quite openly racist yet, right? But then in another meeting, about a week later, somebody from the board said that the development company was, quote, trying to cram this idea of integration down the people's throats.

12:28So clearly, this was about race, right? It was about white people not wanting, as you said, to live near black people. And I think it's fair to say that by the late 1950s, it was starting to become taboo to be openly racist, right? Raisin in the Sun is playing on Broadway about this exact thing happening in that exact area. Yeah. And making the people who are not committed to integration the villain. Right. That's the new thing. So the PDC, the development company, referred to this group in Deerfield as the openly racist North Shore Residents Association.

13:06That phrase appeared in a court document in 1962. Huh. So the idea that you could shame people in America by calling them openly racist was a thing as early as the 1960s, actually a little bit earlier than I would have guessed, I think. Yeah. I definitely would have put it seven or eight years later. Although the truth of the matter is, it's one of those things like McDonald's existed in the 50s.

13:37You don't imagine that they did. Everything is a little older than you think. There have been a long tradition since the 20s of masking the bigotry of those neighborhood covenants to an extent by just referring to property values and things like that. So even somebody in 1925 or 1930 might not want at the outset, especially outside of the South, to be too overt, especially in cold print about things like that. So I can see how even earlier than, you know, the days of black power and a real crack in the plaster in terms of public attitudes among white people, that there would be such a thing as calling someone out and saying openly racist as opposed to just racist.

14:19But that's definitely earlier than I would have expected it because open racism becomes so much more of a social stain starting after the mid 60s and then certainly into the 70s. But yeah, that's a neat, that's a neat example. Well, I'm going to give you one even earlier. And this is the earliest example that I could find of openly racist. It's in a pamphlet titled America's Racist Laws. It was written by the historian Herbert Apteker. He was a giant on the left in the mid to late 20th century.

14:55He, when he died, had an obituary in the New York Times. He was steeped in black history. That was sort of his specialty. He himself was Jewish. So he may have been far ahead of the curve in using this phrase. He was talking in this pamphlet about how local laws are used to disenfranchise black people. He writes, states with rare exception have not passed openly racist laws dealing with suffrage because the 14th Amendment specifically prohibits this.

15:27And he wrote that in 1951. Right, right. That's the earliest example that I could find. And of course, I would put a call out to any listener to please find an example that predates that. Huh. Now, that's fascinating. You can also say that openly racist has a different meaning then than it does now. Because what he's saying is something that's racist and you're not even pretending you're putting it in cold print as opposed to trying to hide it.

16:00And that's something that people were deliberately doing with consciousness. And so the people who were putting those covenants together knew that they weren't really talking just about property values. They were talking about people of a certain color who they didn't want around. And that, you know, may be leading to the property values issue. But they knew. As opposed to somebody saying openly racist in a column in 2023 where putting those two words together is to distinguish unintended subtle racism of the kind that people have to take classes to learn about as opposed to just casual bigotry.

16:35It's interesting, though, that these sorts of things change. Aptecker meant something quite literal, very definite, not even pretending. Today, racism is thought of as so subtle. That's not what I think Aptecker meant. Now, he may have been writing about what we now call societal racism. He's talking about how society puts up barriers to people in ways that may not look like a cross being burned on somebody's lawn, but still qualify as racism. In which case, fewer people were talking to the public about that then than they are now.

17:09And so I'm using a more mainstream parlance than he would have been. But interesting, openly racist. You use it for a different purpose now than you would have before. Aptecker said openly racist laws. In 1962, it was the openly racist North Shore Residents Association. There's another early example from 1952 that I found in the Baltimore Sun where a Dr. Goldman, a rabbi, is quoted weighing in on the national immigration bill that was going through Congress at the time.

17:43And he called the, quote, proposed legislation openly racist. As opposed to you saying the openly racist white teachers. After you wrote that column, there was another column in the New York Times by Thomas Edsel, who quotes a University of Maryland historian. Trump's fine people on both sides after the neo-Nazi riots in Charlottesville indicated that he understood very well that his coalition included voters who were both openly racist and anti-Semitic.

18:16In the 1950s and 60s examples, openly racist was used to refer to an organization, a law, whereas in 2023, we use that phrase to refer to actual people. Yes, that actually dovetails with exactly what I was just thinking, which is that openly racist 1950 means that you're being open about it instead of trying to hide it. But you understand that this is something that would characterize an organization or a policy. Today, when we say it, we're talking about the fact that many people think that in any non-Black person's heart, for example, there is a kind of racism that people need to learn to be made to understand, as opposed to somebody who might come right out and say, no Blacks in my neighborhood.

19:01So, yeah, it's gone psychological. It used to be a matter of the objective. It used to be a matter of the institutional. Now we're talking about what's inside of people. And that parallels a lot of how we have learned to talk about race. It used to be get rid of segregation, get rid of these policies. Then it became look into your heart. How do you actually feel about Black people? And as anybody who knows my work knows, I find some of that rather problematic. I'm not sure where it takes us. But, yes, this term openly racist tracks with that change as well.

19:32Because what I saw was someone who has no fear anymore, who is totally OK with being openly racist and knows that he can gaslight us all. Because obviously the surprise is not that he's taken so long to condemn neo-Nazis, but that he's done it at all. Because, you know, here's a man who displays clear fascist tendencies. You know, he's openly racist. People who are openly racist and make openly racist statements have gotten away with doing this for too long. Why would it stop? But it's become a useful way of distinguishing because for us, racism means you probably didn't know you were a racist, but you are.

20:08And I think that many people, and I have to say, even as a Black person, that I understand where they're coming from. I think many people get impatient with that. Many people either feel that they're not racist or they feel that we talk about it too much. It's a hornet's nest of an issue. And so I think the way to say, we don't mean the kind of racism that you can have a discussion about. We mean the real kind. You say openly racist to just kind of jump over that hurdle of people's sense of ambiguity as to what racism is and how much we need to talk about it.

20:40And so, yeah, openly racist means racist, racist, as opposed to the kind that you have to learn about in college in your sociology class. John McWhorter is professor of linguistics at Columbia University. To share an example of the phrase openly racist or your thoughts on what we discussed today, connect with us on social media at Blue Sky, Facebook, Instagram, or X. Write to us at booksmartstudios at gmail.com or visit us at booksmartstudios.com.

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