A fourth concern is whether, by talking about White supremacy and employing the racialized language of “White” and “Black,” we are perpetuating racial divisions in our communities and obstructing the type of healing to which we aspire. This concern seems largely born of weariness, of a desire to simply move past the trauma of race in America and on to other things. We understand this desire, and we are empathetic with this weariness, but this concern misunderstands the nature of our collective racial trauma. The trauma of racism, as we see it, comes not from the continued deployment of racial categories but from the continued existence of the destructive social realities from which those categories emerged and to which they refer. The way to heal from American racism is not to change our words but to change the social order that put those words in our mouths in the first place. Until we do this, no matter what language we use, our racial divisions will remain.
From “Reparations: A Christian Call for Repentance and Repair” by Duke L. Kwon and Gregory Thompson