From Booksmart Studios, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language. I'm Mike Volo,

joined this week by John McWhorter. If you plug the word racist into Google search trends,

that's an online tool that tracks search data going back to 2004. If you plug in racist,

you see spikes all throughout the past 20 plus years.

But if you plug in the phrase, openly racist, you see almost nothing prior to early 2016 when it

really starts to take off. That coincides precisely with the beginning of the Trump era, when people who either define themselves or are defined by others as openly racist were suddenly empowered in a way that they arguably had not been for decades. And all of a sudden, the phrase was appearing in songs.

How can your hands be blameless supporting a president openly racist administration?

You could hear it in television shows.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Think about it. I mean, dating is the most openly racist and superficial

thing we do as a society. It was all over the news.

There has never been a president in American history.

It has been so openly racist and divisive as this man.

And it remains in frequent use today. So I call John McWhorter, Columbia University linguist and

Lexicon Valley contributor, to unpack openly racist. We started by talking about a column he had

written for the New York Times in 2023, in which he himself had used the phrase.

The title of the column was what the HBO show Southside teaches us.

Southside was actually canceled about 10 seconds after I wrote that column.

I almost feel like it was causal.

But Southside was this remarkable sitcom that was about various black people living in Southside, Chicago,

with various orientations, various social classes, various goals, just trying to make it all work.

And it was one part the Friday's movies or the Barbershop movies.

And frankly, one part, Seinfeld.

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