"Language of Post–Civil Rights White Supremacy"

"The expressions 'racially tinged' and 'racially charged' emerged during the modern civil rights movement. Newspaper databases show the same pattern as Google Ngrams: regular use began in the 1950s and '60s, increased in the late twentieth century, and has been rampant since 2010. ('Racially provocative' also skyrocketed in the 2010s.) Historian Barbara J. Fields has written that the substitution of 'race' for 'racism' 'transforms the act of a subject into an attribute of an object.' More than twenty-five years ago, Fields observed that 'the neutral shibboleths of difference and diversity' had replaced terms such as 'slavery, injustice, oppression, and exploitation.' Fields noted that such language enhanced 'the authority and prestige of race,' a phrase given meaning via the creation of hierarchies of power. The scientifically incoherent concept of 'race' becomes real through such speech acts, which serve to stabilize 'race' as a reality rather than denaturalize it as a social construction."

Lawrence B. Glickman at Boston Review criticizes euphemism that "masks the danger of racism."