code words

we actually talk about race all the time, but we do it in code (Paul Kivel, Uprooting Racism: How White People Can Work for Racial Justice ). "Some of the code words we use are 'underclass,' 'welfare mothers,' 'inner city,' 'illegal aliens,' 'terrorist,' 'politically correct,' and 'invasion.' These color-coded words allow white people to speak about race or about people of color, whether in the United States or abroad, without having to admit to doing so. We don't have to risk being accused of racism; we don't have to worry about being accountable for what we say. We can count on a mutual (white) understanding of the implications of the words without having to specify that this comment is about race.... Each of these three terms [underclass, welfare mothers, inner city] attempts to create a division between white people and African Americans, giving us the illusion they are different than and lower than we are. The facts are distorted to make it seem as if white people and people of color live in different worlds with different cultures and moral values. From this framework it becomes easy to blame them for their poverty and to fail to see the interconnections between their lives and ours." Patricia Hill Collins (Fighting Words) defines racially coded language as "language without an explicit reference to race but embedded with racial meanings nonetheless." See also inner city, racism, underclass, welfare mother.