I already posted today, so payout declined. I posted this in a conversation on Facebook, and ended up liking it enough to post it here, too.
A word only means something when it has a definition.
When talking about a chair I bought yesterday, we both have good understanding of what the basic concept of a chair is; it can be an office chair, a dinner table chair, a potato peeling chair, so there are variations, but regardless we both know the gist of what's being talked about. Despite the variations, the definition of a chair has certain guidelines, which means that the word chair means a chair.
When it comes to the word racism, however, there are no guidelines at this point; the word racism can mean anything from a person merely disliking people because of their race, to a person hating and even being violent towards people because of their race. But it doesn't even end there, since there's an increasing amount of new, made up versions of racism, which further blurs what the exact definition of the word is.
In other words, "racism" can mean anything, and when a word can mean anything, it means it lacks a definition, and a word that lacks a definition it doesn't mean anything at all.
In other words, the aforementioned chair can now be a table, a sink, a bed, or a potato, or pretty much anything else. So, when you tell me you bought a chair, it's pretty much a guessing game whether you bought a cat or a house.
So, the word racism - which had a serious and important meaning once - has been inflated to the point of nothingness by the people most worried about it.