A brilliant article and a “must read.” Please make all the white children in Florida’s private schools read this. Send it to a friend or some white supremacists. It really did an outstanding job of “connecting the dots” over long history of racist tropes—and how they are harmful as weaponized justifications for impending, planned violence by white men taking their knives, bats, and guns out of the closet on the way to a lynching they will create. Dissecting the language is vital as she writes, and the speakers of it, especially the leaders of supremacy, must continually be called out publicly and their little hate packaged words like jogger de-constructed to their face.

The article hits the systemic nail on the head when showing the actions of President Andrew Jackson by connecting the justification of such language and the narrative built from such a supremacist lexicon to the power structure that certifies the use of it and the actions. We could of course place more dots along those lines, with tons of examples, though the lines eventually would be overwhelmed by giant dots, so great are the numerous usage and types.

We can even stretch those lines back, as the authority of pope in two “papal bulls” lent authority to the dehumanization of Africans for the justification of slave taking and trading, by ‘demoting’ Africans into ‘heathens’ for the (im)moral justification of capturing and selling fellow humans. Starting in 1452, those “bulls” issued by the Catholic Church’s leader did more harm than most authoritarian governments inflict by setting up a system for degrading Africans and creating a framework for such language and actions to operate in.

Again, a thousand thank yous for such five star writing and research and for continually inspiring us who seek.