On May 25, 2020, Derek Chauvin, a Minneapolis police officer, murdered George Perry Floyd Jr., and protests erupted in cities and towns across the country. The public health threat of anti-Black police violence in the wake of the pandemic and, more directly, Floyd’s murder led many to describe “twin pandemics” of COVID-19 and racism, a framing that circulated widely. As the analysis emerging from the Black Lives Matter movement has made clear, these are not separate threats: the disproportionately high morbidity and mortality rates in communities of color clearly manifest the structural racism that is, in turn, foundational for public health disasters. It is not surprising that women-of-color feminism has laid the groundwork for an analysis emerging from a movement inaugurated by three Black women. Our essay builds on that work to explore an emerging vocabulary these insights have generated: the adoption of phrases such as “systemic racism” and “white supremacy” as the lingua franca of mainstream media, which has gone largely unremarked, as well as the Merriam-Webster Dictionary’s redefinition of “racism.” We argue for the importance of a changing vocabulary that at once registers and facilitates efforts to address structural racism and the violence it perpetuates.

中文翻译：

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COVID-19 和种族主义语言

2020 年 5 月 25 日，明尼阿波利斯警官德里克·肖万 (Derek Chauvin) 谋杀了小乔治·佩里·弗洛伊德 (George Perry Floyd)，全国城镇爆发抗议活动。大流行之后的反黑人警察暴力的公共卫生威胁，更直接的是，弗洛伊德被谋杀导致许多人描述了 COVID-19 和种族主义的“双重流行病”，这是一个广为流传的框架。正如 Black Lives Matter 运动的分析所表明的那样，这些并不是单独的威胁：有色人种社区中不成比例的高发病率和死亡率清楚地表明了结构性种族主义，而这反过来又是公共卫生灾难的基础。有色女性的女权主义为三位黑人女性发起的一场运动中的分析奠定了基础，这并不奇怪。我们的文章在这项工作的基础上探索了这些见解产生的新兴词汇：采用诸如“系统性种族主义”和“白人至上主义”之类的短语作为主流媒体的通用语，这在很大程度上没有被提及，以及 Merriam -韦伯斯特词典对“种族主义”的重新定义。我们主张不断变化的词汇表的重要性，这种词汇表可以立即记录并促进解决结构性种族主义及其长期存在的暴力的努力。