Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/07/29/fight-for-fifteen.html
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Who are the bastards who keeps racializing these people? We must stop forced racilization. These poor domestic workers are just sitting there when - bam! - they are raced.
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Liked, because I had a similar discussion here a couple of days ago when Cory used this term previously.
Radicalised - made radical
Infantilised - made infantile
Racialised - made racial (but that is not how this term is used here).
But I was told it was a widely accepted term (semi-academic?); however, it still makes no sense to me, and reads rather as you parsed it.
And to the extent race exists, aren’t we all ‘racialised’, irrespective of our skin colour or origins? So why it appears to be applied to non-white only (I am not sure if these racialised people are all just non-white or only Latino, or Asian, or African-American) is not clear to me.
(And for avoidance of doubt I have no intentt or wish to start a discussion/dispute about racial terms, i it is only that the use of the term ‘racialised’ makes no sense to me in English usage, in the two contexts I have seen it used this week. I used terms above as the least clumsy way I coud find to make my point.)
Because “race” is a social construct developed by the caucasian oppressors (aka “white people”) since at least the age of enlightenment, and used as a tool to dehumanize, objectify, enslave, disenfranchise, etc. people of different skin color. I would figure you’d have absorbed this by now, judging by the length of time you’ve been a BB member. Racism is a tool to protect the status quo, and doesn’t apply to those in power (i.e. shit only flows downhill).
Side note: As enlightened as I thought I may have been just a few years ago, I’ve learned a lot from the educators here since joining BB (Cory’s hyperbole aside).
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I understand what you say and why you say it, and I largely agree in general terms (and understand that this clumsy term is specifically used in the context you describe).
But some other “races” (certainly some ‘nationalities’ - in the modern/current geographical sense, where some of their members define their nationality and race as largely overlapping) have for a long time had and still have very similar exclusionary / ‘treat them as second class’ attitudes to others who are not of their ‘race’. I guess this term is not applicable in such contexts.
I get its specificity, and still think it is clumsy as hell, given what the suffix ‘-ised’ usually denotes in English usage.
Thanks for clarifying, and I should have been more precise. They are tricky topics (‘race’ and terms used in discussing it, and also the use of English).
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I think the proper term here is “bigotry”, a personal problem, which does not equal racism, a systemic problem. Racism is always a top-down function, tied to skin color, and perception of the other as monolithic.
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Hmmm. Maybe. But there’s a significant overlap, I believe.
(It’s a shame that too many people seek shorthand, which lacks subtlety and detail.
‘Discriminated against on the basis of skin colour’, or similar, perhaps, might be more expressive than ‘racialised’. But the shorthand seekers probably think that that is clumsy.) 
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