If the country had a National Language Commission, and I were appointed commissioner, the first word I would put in cold storage—filed permanently away beside the N-word, the C-word, the K-word and other prohibited words—would be “racism.” In our day the word has been used imprecisely, promiscuously, perniciously and well beyond abundantly. If you are politically on the left, racism is what you accuse people of who don’t agree with you. If you are on the right, you can accuse them, I suppose, of socialism, but it doesn’t carry anything like the same resonance in moral opprobrium or self-awarded virtue as does racism.

The racist, if we can use the dictionary definition, believes that all members of a particular race possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, which distinguish it as superior or inferior to other races. The true racist of course feels his own race is superior, and thereby he hasn’t any difficulty in discriminating or otherwise ill-treating members of other races, sometimes through government policy—as formerly under apartheid in South Africa or during the strict segregation once pervasive in the American South—or sometimes through ugly personal actions.

I am old enough to remember Jim Crow racism in action. When I lived in Arkansas in the early 1960s, there were still “colored” and white drinking fountains, separate bus and movie seating, and obvious differences in the quality of school buildings and other facilities available to blacks, and most people made no bones about it. Blacks were suppressed, oppressed and made to feel inferior in nearly every way that local governments could devise. The word racism wasn’t much in vogue in that place, or anywhere else, at that time. The majority of people who could rightly be called racist would not know what you were talking about if you accused them of racism.

Only now—long after the successful efforts of Martin Luther King Jr., Roy Wilkins Sr., Whitney Young, A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin and others, now that formally racist laws and social arrangements are defunct and significant progress has been made by blacks—has the word racism become part of everyday speech, the accusation of racism slung about with easy abandon.

Without the word racism Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton would be out of business, Cory Booker could not construct a sentence, Ta-Nehisi Coates would have to write musical comedy, and the so-called Squad of congresswomen would have to argue for the strength of their actual policies, which might not be so easy. Among the race-mongers in the current day no one is safe. Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi, while not flat-out called racists, have recently had racism imputed to them, and by members of their own political party, which must have stung.