The process of ending racism can include increasing awareness of encoding. Racism and sexism have been encoded into meanings of common words. Sufficient understanding removes not only any latent, unknown, word-meaning-ick (in a post-semiotic sense), it diminishes stress. That’s something we can all use today.
The most extreme racism activates the most extreme hate and violence. The same can be said for sexism. It’s time for something different — to add to, not to replace — everything else that we can do to help ‘us’. For progressive people, I think ‘us’ also means our-planet-of-people. ‘Us’ and ‘them’ are but two examples of ordinary human words that harm people — words with anti-human meanings that divide and conquer humans — setting the groundwork for harm, suffering, and ongoing struggle.
Other words, such as Belonging, Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Now assist us in ending racism, sexism, and many ills.
Given our ills, looking into meanings of words becomes non-optional. Appeals to the idea of “a lack of scientific evidence” (prior to consideration of potentially helpful ideas) can enforce the McNamara fallacy, and that will not help us. Instead, if we choose, we can test using our own lives and then invite scientists to perform tests as well.
By inquiring into meanings of words, a la Buddhism, Greek thought, Vedanta, and other ancient traditions, right down to ordinary words such as ‘the’, we can begin a hastened process of ending racist and sexist impulse, while greatly diminishing individual emotional distress (such as ordinary daily stress, anxieties, and so forth).
This can be considered an hypothesis (“a hypothesis” if you’d rather). When sufficient numbers of persons have seen sufficient decreases of stress through rethinking concepts such as ‘the’, ‘our’, ‘is’, and of course, ‘self’ and ‘other’, scientists may take sufficient note of our progress. As scientists gather evidence, a tide will turn, yet not until our own voices have readied a willingness and interest to employ tools of science.
This presents a first post (anywhere) of a 40 year investigation.
My best to you always,
Hillary
June 12, 2020
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