Similar issues have confounded me for years. And I've come to believe that a consistent strawman and Catch-22 can be found in political correctness: If we agree

Similar issues have confounded me for years. And I've come to believe that a consistent strawman and Catch-22 can be found in political correctness: If we agree to use the substitute words, we admit the original words were designed to segregate and that we used them to that end. If we don't agree to the substitute words, we prove the original words were designed to segregate and that we will use them to that end. Most of these claims are bait. The goal isn't for the person asserting them to strike meaningful change in our understanding of the issue. They want to appear informed because they feel protected from criticism over their individual culpability. An anecdote: I had a friend who spent years patronizing white people she knew over their "ignorance" on the disproportionate impact of domestic abuse on black and Hispanic women. One evening, she flippantly described them as "too ghetto to know 'wuz good'..." So, all that talk and insistence, and she was the only person in the room with that opinion.