Erasure of racial language makes naming racism itself look mad

Evidence

Race has been rendered invisible, untouchable, as unnoticeably polluting as the toxic air we all breathe. Unseen yet the racist effects are still suffered. But if unmentionable it is because any terms of reference have been eclipsed (more accurately, it might be said that they have been ellipsed, disappearing in the white spaces between the dots). Not simply legally irresponsible, in Agamben’s terms, but ethically so too. There can be no response if the terms of recognition and response are unavailable. There is no possibility of saying the deleterious effects of racial application are even ethically wrong because there is nothing there by which to recognize the phenomena purportedly at issue. Making the charge makes you mad. The anger itself at the lack of discerning language is a sign of your madness. You are mouthing words no one else recognizes. Idiolects and idiocy are taken to go hand in hand. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 838

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The double-bind: without accepted terms, the victim who names the harm is pathologized as mad, so the erasure is self-reinforcing. This resists any one-sentence reduction.
• BMF: The victim whose accurate speech is heard as madness evokes Zamyatin’s ‘We’ where deviant perception of reality gets treated as illness requiring cure - here the racial charge is institutionalized as idiolect-idiot pairing much as I-330 and D-503’s doubts are pathologized.
• XREF: The ‘ellipsed’ erasure concept connects to the reader’s prior curations of silence and absence - particularly the idea that unspeakable harm loses moral recognizability. — connects to: Whiteness being the unspoken norm makes naming it feel racist even to racialised minorities. — Luke de Noronha, The conviviality of the overpoliced,…, 60; Academics are more disturbed by naming bias than by bias itself — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 82