Was a shooting ‘racially motivated’ or just ‘racist’?

It pains me to say, but sometimes an adverb is better than an adjective. Even when that adjective is the word racist.

Much of the time, racially motivated or racially charged is misused as a euphemism for racist; that was even the subject of my very first column almost five years ago. But in the case of a white man who shot three Black people in Jacksonville, Fla., two weeks ago, much of the clamor about calling the shooting “racially motivated” instead of “racist” is misplaced.

Worse, it’s imprecise, which lets the racist shooter off the hook more than it should.

The reason? Gerunds are messing with us.

Gerunds are messing with us.

When I first tackled this subject in 2018, George H.W. Bush had just died, and a slew of retrospectives on his life and presidency recalled the racist Willie Horton ads that helped Bush win the 1988 election. The ads stoked white fears of Black criminals, but rather than calling the ads “racist,” most of the Bush hagiographies referred to them as “racially charged” or “racially inflected.” “Racially charged ad” is less direct and less precise than “racist ad,” so the impact is softer, and thus our 41st president got off easier than if we had called him a racist.

» READ MORE: What’s the difference between racist and racially charged? | The Grammarian

Since 2018, many media outlets have gotten better about calling racist incidents racist, not “racially charged,” and watchdogs are more vigilant about calling out those media outlets that go too heavy on the racially adverbs. Unfortunately, those watchdogs don’t always get it right.

After the Jacksonville shooting, Sheriff T.K. Waters said, and the media repeated, “This shooting was racially motivated.” That prompted many to protest that “racially motivated” is too weak a descriptor, and that “racist” is more accurate.

Just one problem: It’s less accurate.

Not because the shooter wasn’t racist; he absolutely was and should be called out as such. Rather, while a person (or an ad or a system or a country) can be racist, it’s much trickier for a shooting to be racist.

Shooting is a gerund: a verbal noun. Take the verb shoot and add -ing — voila, you have a gerund, which walks, talks, and quacks like a noun. But even if a gerund acts like a noun, it can’t do everything that a noun can do. The Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of gerund cleanly establishes the battle lines: “a form of the Latin verb capable of being construed as a noun, but retaining the regimen of the verb.”

Even if it’s doing the work of a noun, a gerund hasn’t totally shed its verby roots. The verb is still hiding there, beneath the -ing, waiting to pounce.

Like a racist hiding under a “racially charged” euphemism.

Since a gerund isn’t a regular noun, shooting doesn’t work with an adjective like racist in the same way that a noun like shooter would. The shooter can be racist, but the shooting? Not so much.

You need an adverb instead. “Racially motivated shooting,” while it feels softer, is more accurate, and therefore stronger.

When you’re calling out racists, it’s important to use the strongest language possible. If you don’t, you never know who might ride the coattails of racism all the way to the White House.

The Grammarian, otherwise known as Jeffrey Barg, looks at how language, grammar, and punctuation shape our world, and appears biweekly. Send comments, questions, and gerundives to jeff@theangrygrammarian.com.