A chair is an object, and we can objectively agree upon the fact that chairs exist. But the “we”—a third-person plural—I’m invoking here is nothing like the chair, as we are objects (bodies and brains) who happen to have subjective experiences. The degree to which we square off our inner models of reality with external, objective things—like chairs, or empirically blatant evidence of a gamut of things that make up the assemblage of forces we call “racism”—determines the parameters around what exactly it means to decide if a concept is cogent enough to be shared among subjects, what it means for a concept to reference something that happens to be “real.” That process of reality checking is the discursive nature of history; and experience itself of time requires subjectivity and shared communicative conventions (vocabulary, syntax, grammar, etc.), if indeed the conceptual referents we use to navigate reality at any given state across history change just as we do.

The neat thing about markdown is how easy it is to link to other parts of the internet; the browser has no choice, as an object, but to render whatever you manipulate your code to say, but you—a subject with an inner life—didn’t integrate any links to justify any of this. A blog post is an object, and it’s not going to be able to hold enough information to make the case that racism—the systemic organization of humans according to a number of metrics beyond skin color, all varying in form over history—simply “doesn’t exist.”

That’s a lot, but I wanted to unpack what I meant in an earnest way, b/c I don’t think your’e trolling with this post, but all of the above could be said this way, too, and a bit more to the point: You write that “a word only means something when it has a definition.” Definitions are not propriety; words cannot “have” anything—not just because they’re not economic subjects, but also because a word isn’t a “thing,” but a pattern of mouth noises we make which happen to correspond with squiggles. There’s a lot of writing on the ever-changing meaning of race, but you’ll never see a biography of it—chairs, nor words, have never been subjected to chattel slavery; no object has, but chairs are great to sit in while reading a book about racism, many of which literally are just expositions of the changing meaning of race. That’s an objective fact that I hope we can all agree on.