"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less." "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master—that's all."
George Rebane
In a more learned time ‘racism’ was defined by first class dictionaries like the Random House Dictionary of the English Language (Unabridged) 2 ed as “a belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human racial groups determine cultural or individual achievement, usually involving the idea that one's own race is superior and has the right to dominate others or that a particular racial group is inferior to the others.” Today, Dictionary.com still posts that same definition verbatim. Unfortunately, that’s where it ends.
In days of yore, and perhaps still among the more precise speakers and writers, a ‘racist’ was a person who embraced such a belief or doctrine. No longer. Today in the public forum ignorance and political cynicism rule the day, and are reinforced by the hour in print, online, in schools, and by politicians of both parties. Racist can be an indictment of someone's comments that have absolutely nothing to do with racism, simply on the invocation of 'We know what he really meant'. It is of a piece of our declining culture that does not bode well for America. One of my early commentaries on racism was ‘Who is a Racist?’; there I particularly call your attention to the intense and self-assured responses from our liberal commenters.
Today, racist is a label publicly, cynically, and even gratuitously hung around the neck of –
- Anyone who disagrees with your speech or opinion;
- Any white person who disagrees with the speech or opinion of a non-white person;
- Any white person who describes a non-white person in any but the most salutary terms;
- Anyone who tells a non-white to ‘go back where you came from’;
- Anyone who describes radical Islam in their own terms;
- Anyone who opposes illegal entry into the US;
- Anyone who opposes taxpayer funded succor and sanctuary to illegal aliens;
- Anyone who calls a shithole country a shithole country;
- Anyone who wants illegal aliens deported according to our laws;
- Anyone who wants to enforce our immigration laws;
- Anyone who cites the race-based IQ testing results published by the American Psychological Association;
- Anyone who points out the cultural deficits of a non-white country;
- Anyone who identifies a mulatto as a mulatto;
- Any white person who disagrees with an elected politician, official, teacher, … of color;
- Any white person who criticizes the government sponsored demise of the black family;
- Anyone who points out that overwhelmingly and obviously people like to live among cultural likes;
- Anyone who points out the failure of certain non-white groups to assimilate;
- … .
The list goes on indefinitely as expressions and behaviors are uncritically labeled ‘racist’. What they all share in common is that each has absolutely nothing to do with the original precise definition of racism. In spite of this, for the Left 'racist' has long become the preferred pejorative with which to tar their political opponents. So today ‘racist’ can mean anything, when it actually means nothing. The danger to our republic is that the Humpty Dumpty approach to semantics has now been baked into our justice system.
[24jul19 update] The national press is taking up the points of my above commentary. To wit, that the media offer no proof or basis for charging President Trump’s tweets to have been ‘racist’. They just continue to pile on empty moralizing, repeating the racist charge with no accompanying reasoning or evidence whatsoever. In the comment stream below, we see the echoes of this from our local liberal light-thinkers who have never been able to go beyond the lamestream’s talking points. To their benefit we beseech, ‘Lord, forgive them for they know not what they say.’
An example of this appears in ‘Prove the Tweets Were Racist’ by WSJ editorial board member Holman Jenkins. Excerpts from his piece follow –
- Numerous outlets this week deceived themselves when they referred to Mr. Trump’s “racist tweets” as if their racist nature was an established fact that good reporting had nailed down. They think they are being brave when they are being the opposite. Brave was a dissenter: Keith Woods, National Public Radio’s diversity chief, who argued on NPR’s website that reporters should report facts and do interviews and leave the moralizing to people they quote.
- (The media sought) to incriminate Mr. Trump with words and actions of people who are not Mr. Trump. Media outlet after media outlet confidently asserted that Mr. Trump was speaking in racist code. But if it’s code, its meaning cannot be detected in the plain words, so we must rely on the media’s anointed code breakers to tell us what Mr. Trump really meant. (emphasis mine)
- Trump makes a great deal of trouble for himself because he insists on free-associating in public. He won’t, like other politicians, stick to scripts carefully scrubbed of ambiguity. But the press does not make truth out of ambiguity by putting words in his mouth. (emphasis mine)
- If they acquired a bit of political realism (from Trump’s election), reporters might even notice something about Mr. Trump’s “make America great again” slogan. It gives a large and ineradicable part of the electorate a way to frame their interests and discontents without reciprocating the identity-based claims of those they see (not altogether inaccurately) as assailing them.
- Frankly, some humility is also in order from a press that has displayed a more than usual amount of gullibility, conformism and poor judgment on just about every matter that has come before them in the past few years. If the media’s not-so-secret agenda is to defeat Mr. Trump, they might consider the possibility that they are (again) going about it in exactly the wrong way.
rebanesruminations.com 
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