We have misused the term "racist" until it's utterly useless

This latest round of its saturating our discourse is not where it got started. It was already depleted of real meaning years ago. Charges of racism have been hurled at presidents and legislators for decades.

It ostensibly has very clear parameters on its definition, but nobody bothers to regard them.

At least when they deal with people of actually different races, there's the ability to prove or disprove the charge. For instance, when the claim is made that there is systemic racism in America's law-enforcement agencies, we can look at statistics that show it just isn't so.

But the term "racism" gets trotted our when the groups juxtaposed against each other in a situation are all of the same race. Technically speaking, Arabs and Latinos are white. "Ethnic bigotry" is the accurate term for these situations, provided that in a given situation there actually is any.

I won't digress too far into the matter of Trump's Twitter habit and how he has been outdoing even his own track record for ill-advised tweets lately, only to say that it's too much of a stretch to draw the conclusion that he's implying that one race or ethnic group is inferior or superior to another based on his characterization of the countries of origin of the unnamed persons - or their forebears, in the cases of the ones born in the US - in Trump's recent infamous "go back" tweet as "broken and crime-infested." Let's assume, because we safely can, that he was talking about Somalia, Palestinian-controlled areas of the mideast, and Puerto Rico. These places plainly are broken and crime-infested.

The "of color" formulation has been the most effective way that identity politics hustlers have blurred the lines between racism and bigotry. And even so, bigotry charges often come off looking flimsy. AOC, in a provocative tweet of her own, strongly implied that Nancy Pelosi was motivated by it, and it just looked plain ridiculous. Spokespeople for the Congressional Black Caucus said so.

All this said, it must be noted here that Trump's tweet was, in the words of Power Line's John Hinderaker, "the worst unforced error of his presidency." Anyone with any sense in 2019 post-America knows that you don't put rhetorical minefields right in front of your feet. It's tactically self-destructive. A tiny bit of, if not contrition, at least acknowledgement that he was ineffective at expressing what he meant would build his political capital, but that's not how he rolls and it's almost certainly too much to expect.

To repeat what I say here often, and others say often as well, he's not playing chess, he's winging it.

And that's why his shills look so pathetic trying to parse what he said and make it look acceptable. The damage was done immediately and their after-the-fact polishing of the stool sample does nothing to ameliorate it.

So what could we do to lessen, perhaps even rid ourselves of, the current climate, which has everybody on edge, checking to see if her or she is vulnerable to charges of racism or bigotry, and jockeying to see who among one's ideological opponents might be ripe for being so charged?

We could just drop it.

That's right, we could, in the next moment, if we so chose, just knock it off with all this race and ethnicity talk.

There is only one way at this point to end or diminish racism and that is to shut up about it. Otherwise, what you really want, whether you admit it or not, is to perpetuate racism for your own advantage—like Al Sharpton (and many others, obviously, some of whom want desperately to be in the White House).

But don't believe me. Believe Morgan Freeman. Let's roll back to the Early Paleolithic Age (2005), when the great black actor was on 60 Minutes with Mike Wallace:

MIKE WALLACE, CBS`s "60 MINUTES": Black History Month, you find...

MORGAN FREEMAN, ACTOR: Ridiculous.

WALLACE: Why?

FREEMAN: You`re going to relegate my history to a month?

WALLACE: Come on.

FREEMAN: What do you do with yours? Which month is White History Month? Come on, tell me.

WALLACE: I'm Jewish.

FREEMAN: OK. Which month is Jewish History Month?

WALLACE: There isn`t one.

FREEMAN: Why not? Do you want one?

WALLACE: No, no.

FREEMAN: I don`t either. I don`t want a Black History Month. Black history is American history.

WALLACE: How are we going to get rid of racism until...?

FREEMAN: Stop talking about it. I'm going to stop calling you a white man. And I'm going to ask you to stop calling me a black man. I know you as Mike Wallace. You know me as Morgan Freeman. You`re not going to say, "I know this white guy named Mike Wallace." Hear what I'm saying?

Stop talking about it. Interesting idea, isn't it? I doubt Cory Booker would approve. 'The Squad" would doubtless go apoplectic. Nevertheless, it's the only way to end racism—stop talking about it. We already have laws against it, for a long time now, as we should. And they should be strictly enforced. But the rest of the blah-blah has got to go. It only makes people hate each other. It creates racism rather than solves it.

Why don't we do it? Because a whole lot of people would have to find something actually meaningful to do with their lives if they could no longer convince the rest of us that we still have an interminable docket of "uncomfortable conversations" about not much at all in front of us.

In short, the hustling industry insists on it.