What does “racism” mean? Part 1/5 — What does “meaning” mean?
I’ll try to keep this section fairly short but since I haven’t written anything before about the differences between “definition” and “meaning” I think that a brief summary is called for. When most people ask what a word means they usually think of dictionaries and definitions. Definitions are a taxonomic tool used as a guide for performing certain tasks. If you are learning a new language then a dictionary in that language can be incredibly useful for understanding the meaning of words you haven’t encountered before. The dictionary isn’t what gives the words their meaning though. Linguists went out and talked to a bunch of native speakers, asking what they think a word means. They gathered examples of how it was used and then used those to create a brief summary of the meaning or meanings that people associate with that word.
Most people understand on some level that dictionary definitions are just an average approximation of the sorts of things that people mean when they use the word. There are some ways that the word is used which fall outside of the definition. There are some ways of using a word which technically fall inside the boundary of the definition but would sound off to native speakers. Even still, there are certain schools of thought about meaning which really want there to be “necessary and sufficient conditions” for whether or not a word applies in a particular instance. Unfortunately there’s both strong empirical evidence that that’s not how people in fact use words and well reasoned philosophical positions that explain why we shouldn’t think about words that way. Theories of categorical meaning in cognitive science suggest that people associate “prototypes” with a category and then determine if a particular instance is sufficiently close to one of the prototypes in order to figure out if the word applies in that instance. This is why some children might mistake a bat for a bird or a whale for a fish. Beyond empirical evidence, philosophers like Ludwig Wittgenstein (at least in his later years) argued that the most important words in our language can’t possibly be defined in a meaningful way. Their usage is the fundamental way in which we should try to understand their meaning.
That is what I will be doing here. I will be trying to describe the meaning of “racism” on the basis of how it is used. Particularly I’ll be examining two different usages of the word and examining how they’re related. If words have more than one possible usage then the dictionary will often enumerate different “senses” in which the word is used. There might just be two completely different things that, for weird historical reasons, people use the exact same word to describe. An example of this is “pen” which can be either a writing device or something used to contain animals. There might be two ways the word is used which are related but fundamentally different such as “theory”. In common usage “theory” means something closer to “best guess” while in scientific writing it means something closer to “proven model”. Finally we have words like “racism” which have multiple distinct usages which are truly different senses of the word but which are directly related to each other in a meaningful way. The different usages of racism can roughly be summed up as “individual racism” and “systemic racism”. Any time I use those specific two word phrases it is to signify which of the two meanings of “racism” I’m specifically talking about.
In summary, the answer to this essay’s titular question will come in the form of an in depth description of two different senses of the word “racism” followed by a description of the relationship between those two meanings. The descriptions won’t be usable as a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for determining whether or not a particular thing falls into the category of “things which are racism”. They will simply be descriptive of two families of usages for the term with high similarity and a description of the relationship between those two families and how they aren’t talking about different things but rather different aspects of the same thing. You won’t be able to use this as a deterministic guide for classifying what is or isn’t racist but it should give you a deeper understanding of the topic so that you are better equipped to make that determination in a holistic manner.
