Brilliant new plug-in corrects ‘racially charged’ in articles and tweets to ‘racist’

You mean racist?!

'You Mean Racist?' is a new plug-in you didn't know you needed in your life.

Racist Stamp thegrio.com
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Sick of seeing the term “racially charged” when the appropriate word would be “racist?” If so, you will be happy to hear there is a new plug-in that will replace the minimizing term to the correct one.

Tolulope Edionwe, a New York-based web developer, set out to fix this issue and created a Google Chrome plug-in. It’s called “You Mean Racist?” and it replaces the term “racially charged” with “racist.” When it has been corrected you will see the word racist in a red font. The plug-in also works on articles either on Twitter posts.

A screenshot on The Outline shows how the plug-in works on Twitter.

When President Trump made his “sh**hole countries” remarks about Haiti, El Salvador and some African nations, while at the same time saying he would welcome more immigrants from predominantly white countries, the New York Times called them “racially charged comments.” That’s somewhat of a head-scratcher when they should have just called it like it was and called them racist comments. This is just one example among many of how the media downplays racism in the US.

“In general, our policy is to try to be neutral and precise and as accurate as we possibly can be for the given situation,” John Daniszewski, the Associated Press’s editor at large for standards, said. “We’re very cautious about throwing around accusations of our own that characterize something as being racist. We would try to say what was done, and allow the reader to make their own judgment.”

That might apply to some situations and some terms that exist, but take the article by Jia Tolentino in The New Yorker as an example. The article was titled “Charlottesville and the Effort to Downplay Racism in America” and a photo caption actually described the white supremacist rallies as “various racially charged incidents.” Really? If you can’t manage to call white supremacist rallies racist, there’s a real problem.

Some things are just plain old racist, not racially charged. Period.  Call a thing a thing.

 

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