Tension over racial inequality has been more visible in the past few years and this summer that tension has culminated in an odd fixation on whether or not any given person is a racist. Primarily, this question gets posed about the president. News organizations have spent many hours debating headlines and how to describe his words. A lot of fretting has been done over whether they should cross the line into calling his behavior “racist” as if it’s an accusation of treason. On the ground, Trump supporters get pegged as “a bunch of racists”. Whether someone is “a racist” or not has become a sorting hat and one that I think is particularly unhelpful.

I think we need to stop using the term as a noun. Humans are not binary beings. We are never one thing. In the past few years various communities have wisely advocated for changes in language that avoid defining people by one aspect of their lives because it helps us to remember and acknowledge the humanity in all of us. It is both more humanizing and more accurate to say that someone is a person experiencing homelessness than a to call them “a homeless person”. The same for a person with substance use disorder or a person in recovery instead of “an addict”. Words matter and word usage matters.

In the case of racism, I think that quickly labeling people as “a racist” is dumb, but it’s something that people on the left, in particular, have taken on as their duty. Point out all the racists. Call them out and figure out how to defeat them. It’s like we’re playing a video game, and a not very sophisticated one, in which all of the “bad guys” are clearly identified as targets to be eliminated. Labeling people as “a racist” allows us to distance ourselves from people we don’t like and boosts our own sense of self-righteousness. It dehumanizes other people, which , incidentally, is exactly what we say “the racists” do.

For the last several years, I’ve been trying to learn more about the nature of racism in our country. The most important thing I’ve learned is how totally pervasive it is. We live in a culture of white supremacy. Our country was founded on it and laws and policies have been systematically and intentionally established throughout our history to ensure that white people always benefit more. There are a million ways this fact gets dressed up to look like something else, but ultimately this is the case. We live in a society that is designed for white people to have more power, more money and more safety.

To grow up white in this country means to grow up in a culture of racism. This does not mean that I hate people of color. This doesn’t mean that I go around denigrating people or actively working to undermine them. It does mean that I have benefited in ways I often don’t even recognize, because of something over which I have no control: the color of my skin. It means that I have grown up in a society that views white culture as “the norm” and everything else as less. It means that it nearly impossible for me not to have a deeply ingrained sense that white people are “better.” It means that I am racist.

I am a lot of other things as well. That is one aspect of my nature. But I don’t have to look very far to see examples of how I think about black people differently than I think about white people. It is ingrained behavior. I hate this fact, but that doesn’t make it untrue.

But it is also liberating to acknowledge my racism. It allows me to say “Okay, white supremacy infects all of us. That is a fact. Now what do I do?” That question is not one that is answered so much as it has to be lived. I attended a workshop about the process of change that white people go through when we start to understand and recognize the ubiquity of racism in our country and one of the facilitators put it this way: You don’t wake up one day healed and then forget about it for the rest of your life. It’s like a card you have to earn every day, and it always expires at midnight.

In this episode of Ana Maria Cox’s podcast With Friends Like These, Robin DiAngelo talks about the fact that the term “white fragility” has become somewhat ubiquitous in America. The term refers to the defensiveness white people feel and demonstrate when their views or character are questioned, particularly on the topic of race. I appreciate DiAngelo’s work and I found that episode extremely helpful, but I think there are a lot of well-meaning people who do not spend their days thinking about this and may have never heard the term white fragility. That’s nothing to be ashamed of. However, we do have to start spending more time thinking about this if we’re going to lob accusations of racism at others.

Ultimately, there are (at least) three things that I must do in the face of the reality of my own racism: internal work to learn how to minimize the impact, fight for institutional changes, and act with love toward people of color who experience the impacts of this messed up world every single day. There is no time left in there for maintaining a labeling system of who else is a racist.