Racist Phrases to Stop Using

Even today, our everyday speech is littered with words that are, quite frankly, extremely racist. There’s the term “master bedroom”, which, in real estate, refers to the largest room in the house. Since the term has connotations to the era of slavery, as it was the room belonging to the “master” of the house, while slaves at the time did not have such frivolities, some realtors are choosing to retire the phrase.

Even in the technological world, racial phrases pop up. When describing components of hardware that control one another, the terms to describe this technology are slave and master. They’ve been around for decades, and finally concerns are being raised about their uses: Python eliminated the terms from their databases in 2018, while other softwares did the same in 2014. The new terms include, depending on the company and the software, leader and follower, or primary and replica.

The origins of the terms “blacklist” and “whitelist” are not racial, yet some argue that they do reinforce the idea that black is bad and white is good, a mindset that has been implemented for centuries. Even in the theatre world, including Ancient Greek times, the idea of darkness and the colour black showing someone or something as morally corrupt still lives on today.

Additionally, the “peanut gallery” in the theatre world refers to the cheapest seats in the theatre. Sometimes people will make jokes around the “peanut gallery”, going as far as to say, “no comments from the peanut gallery”, implying that the people sitting there are stupid and not able to keep up with the play being shown. In the 19th century, this term was applied to all the seats where the black people sat. Of course even words like “lynching” or “lynch mob” have fairly obvious racial connotation — for the term originially applied to a group of often White people who chose to torture and kill Black people, often by hanging them. Now this phrase refers to unfair punishment, even though many believe that we should eradicate it from our vocabulary altogether.

Another word that is sometimes used, particularly in the Western world, is “uppity”, which refers to someone who is a bit of a snob, and is arrogant. This was, in the past, used to describe Black people that some White people believed were not showing them enough deference. When Black people were lynched, it was sometimes because they were too “uppity”, so this term has a lot of connotations behind it. “Uppity” is a word that has been used to describe Barack Obama and his wife Michelle Obama when they were in presidency. It has also been thrown at Meghan Markle, who is biracial. The newspapers and journalists that used the term claimed not to know of its racist origin.

These terms are outdated, and I myself hope to inspire people to stop saying them due to their awful racial connotations. There are a lot of things holding equality and equity back, and this is one of them. If we stop using these words or phrases, we could perhaps unify ourselves and our communities even further. We all live on one planet, after all, and we want to establish unity and equality between and for all. After all, it’s only losing a few words from your vocabulary.