How “Racist” Became the Dirtiest Word in Britain

When Xenophobia and Bigotry are Shrugged off but the Label Itself Sparks Outrage, the Conversation is Already Rigged.

Words have power. I’ve started multiple pieces with those three words before, and I’ll probably do it again. Because it remains true. And now more than ever considering that we’re living through a moment where those words are being bent and pivoted into completely losing their meaning.

Racism, homophobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia, misogyny - these are supposed to be terms describing acts, behaviours, attitudes and prejudices. What's been increasingly happening, though, is that these descriptors have been reframed as the insult.

The slur.

The attack.

Being called racist is apparently now more offensive than actually being racist.

The act itself? Meh. The label? Well, we can't have people calling other people what they are, that's just outrageous!

Just Don’t Call Him Xenophobic

Case in point, Robert Generic Jenrick, just the other week wrote in the Daily Mail:

“I certainly don’t want my children to share a neighbourhood with immigrant men with backward views who broke into Britain illegally, and about whom we know next to nothing.”

The BBC’s Thought for the Day guest, Dr Krish Kandiah, said what is patently obvious:

The language used by the Shadow Justice Secretary was xenophobic.

Boom! Cue meltdown.

Published on 13 August 2025.

Jenrick wasn’t called a “coward” or a “fraud” or even “a man who looks like he still asks his mum to iron his shirts.” Just xenophobic. And the BBC - our supposedly fearless broadcaster - apologised. Not to the readers of the Daily Mail for printing the thing. Not to immigrants who might be smeared by it. To Jenrick. For someone saying the word “xenophobic” out loud.

Where We Find Ourselves

This is where we now somehow find ourselves. The issue is no longer about what you say, it’s about whether anyone dares call it what it is, and if they do, the scandal isn’t the prejudice itself - it’s the naming of it.

Spend five minutes on X and you’ll be able to pick it up. Someone posts: “Why do gays need a whole month of Pride? I don’t get a straight month.” Or: “I’m just saying, if you look at Africa, you can see why there are so many problems.” Or: “Of course women should be equal, but if they insist on working, who’s going to raise the kids properly?”

They think they’ve made a clever point. Someone replies: “That’s homophobic,” or racist, or sexist, and suddenly the floodgates of imagined injury open wide. “Wow, typical lefty, I can’t even raise a concern without being attacked.” “So much for free speech.” “You can’t say anything these days.”

And just like that, the pivot has been performed and the original remark gets buried under the performance of wounded innocence. They've gone from the person being challenged to the victim of mean old words like “racist.”

Grimes Enters, Stage (Far) Right

Another brilliant demonstration of this came in as I was writing this article in the form of newly elected Reform Board member, Darren Grimes.

Grimes posted a video of his brother on a boat in Scarborough and, not very cleverly, quipped about it looking like a “dinghy to Dover” with the supposed punchline that, of course it couldn’t be, because there were women and children aboard. A lazy gag that wouldn’t have been out of place at a UKIP fundraiser circa 2014, and yes, racist.

When people called it out there was no pause on behalf of our burgeoning comedian to reflect on why, exactly, it may be considered racist to mock people of colour who are just out in public on a ferry as asylum seekers or illegal migrants - no, no.

He reached for the below response instead:

Posted by Darren Grimes at 11:08 on 25 Aug 2025

He hit all the notes of the song of his people - he claimed it was “about democracy, not hate,” insisted that the term racist was a “smear” and then in the crescendo reached for the classic “I won’t be silenced” while posting from an account with over 465,000 followers.

The original racist comment gets buried under his his performance of injury. The story becomes not what he said, but whether the dreaded R-word is far, and just like that, Grimes has managed to cast himself as a victim of those ever nasty lefties, rather than the author of a nasty little remark.

“I’m Not, Racist, But…”

For some context, I grew up hearing this trick deployed pretty much on a daily basis. South Africa in the twilight of apartheid was a rancid petri dish of polite racism. Every other sentence began with: “I’m not racist, but…”, and what followed was invariably racist.

Always.

“I’m not racist, but you know how Black people are with time.”

“I’m not racist, but immigrants just don’t understand our way of life.”

The “but” is doing Olympic-level gymnastics, straining every single fibre of it's three letter existence, trying desperately to soften the blow, to create plausible deniability, to let the speaker strut away feeling sophisticated instead of shameful. It was poison in a porcelain teacup. And I see it now happening all the time.

From Pub Bore to TED Talk

I will also say at this point that the delivery and the person doing the delivery has evolved as well. It’s not just the pub bore at your local muttering into his pint anymore - this type of racism has had a glow up. We now very often find this happening in the well-groomed, bookshelf-backgrounded “public intellectual” who packages prejudice as if it’s a TED Talk.

You’ve got the alt-right lads in the US with their perfect hair and tailored suits, a la Richard Spencer, droning on about “cultural compatibility” and “IQ averages,” as though racism becomes less racist if you wear cufflinks while saying it.

In the UK, David Starkey is making a second career out of being “cancelled,” now lending gravitas to Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain project. Remember Starkey’s claim that slavery wasn’t genocide because “so many damn blacks survived”? I do. But if you call it racist, the discussion instantly becomes: “Ah, but wait now, should we really be using such a strong word, if you really think about what he's saying, and he's from a different time?”

Which is weapons-grade nonsense, and is the crux of the slurification of racism: the word becomes the crime, not the overt bigotry. Call someone a racist, and you’re the aggressor. Call something xenophobic, and suddenly you’ve committed an even greater sin than writing a whole op-ed about not wanting your kids near immigrants.

And that dovetails neatly with the omnipresent spectre of “cancel culture.”

You’re Not Being “Silenced”, We Just Think You’re Awful

Whenever someone is criticised - usually while sitting in a cushy chair on national television or writing a column in a paper with a circulation of millions - the peeling of that particular bell goes wild:

“I am being SILENCED!”, displayed vividly in Grimes’s response above.

I find this just to be extraordinary. Someone can literally be shouting from a platform that reaches millions, and yet the real problem, apparently, is that people don’t clap along. We've somehow managed to get to the point where accountability has been turned into censorship, and people thinking you're a bit of an arsehole has been turned into an attack on your livelihood. Consequences have been reframed as tyranny. It’s the oldest trick in the book: cry victim before anyone can call you villain.

Now, quick caveats before someone fires up a thread about how I’ve just called 4 million people racists.

The Caveats

No, I don’t believe every Reform UK voter is racist, but if you are racist, Reform is probably the party you feel most at home in. That doesn’t make every voter a bigot. But it does mean bigots see Reform as their flag of convenience. And I think we can all agree that when the racists choose your party as their tribe, you might want to ask yourself why.

The second caveat is of course to acknowledge that there are issues. Of course there are. Migration needs better management. Integration requires investment. Communities can feel strain when services are already stretched. But the moment you take that leap from “housing is scarce” to “it’s the migrants’ fault,” you’re not talking about housing anymore, you’re scapegoating. When you say “schools are full because of refugees,” you’re not highlighting education problems, you’re weaponising them. That simply is not "concern", it is bigotry.

Which brings me to an important question - why does this tactic work? Why has “being called racist” become a heavier insult than the act itself?

Because - and any toddler in the middle of a tantrum knows this instinctively - it flips the table over. It distracts. Instead of talking about what was said, we end up talking about whether it’s polite to say “racist.” The focus shifts from substance to etiquette. The strategy is brilliant, if you think about it: racism gets rebranded as a "mere difference of opinion", while the people pointing it out are tarred as the true extremists.

And this tactic isn’t even new, it's just been refined.

From Political Correctness Gone Made to WOKE!

It started with “political correctness gone mad” in the 90s, became “snowflakes” in the 2010s and now it’s “woke” and “cancel culture.” Each iteration is about making it seem as though the real oppression is having to watch your words. Not that your words oppress. Not that they marginalise. No, no - the tyranny, apparently, is that you can’t say them without someone noticing.

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve been told: “It’s just my opinion, I’m entitled to it.” Sure. And everyone else is entitled to think your opinion is racist. That’s how free speech works. But this bit is always left out, because acknowledging it makes the trick collapse. The whole game relies on making “racist” the bigger insult than racism.

One of the best case studies in the slurification of the term racist has to be the curious case of Laurence Fox, professional contrarian, failed actor and self-styled martyr of the anti-woke brigade.

The Curious Case of Mr Fox

In 2020, during the heady days of COVID lockdowns and social media overloads, Fox decided to launch a running war against Sainsbury’s “safe spaces” campaign during black history month. Many would agree that his approach was racist. So far, so normal.

The Now Deleted Tweet from Laurence Fox

However, instead of pausing to consider whether he might have, you know, made an utter bell of himself, Fox did what Fox does - he lashed out. He called two of his former critics, Simon Blake, a stonewall trustee, and Crystal, a drag performer, “paedophiles”, which does show just the depth of intellectual rigour we’re dealing with here.

They sued him. Unsurprisingly. To which Fox decided to respond by counter-suing them on the basis that being called “racist” was defamatory and had ruined his hitherto sterling reputation as an upstanding, completely normal man that doesn’t have a Twitter timeline that so often speaks for itself.

This did not go down as he expected, because it turned out, the high court was having none of it. The judge ruled in favour of Blake and Crystal on the basis that Fox’s accusations were “seriously harmful, defamatory and baseless” (which they were), and his counter-claim - that the word “racist” was somehow more libellous than him casually accusing people of paedophilia - was chucked in the bin with all the contempt it deserved.

It’s worth mulling this over for a moment. In Fox’s reality, being called a racist was somehow the greater outrage than him branding two people child abusers. And if this feels completely absurd to you, well, that’s because it is, but that’s also the point of it.

What To Actually Do About Slurification

I think it would be fair to say that we’ve now established the problem - that racism has been slurified, the perpetrators have made themselves the victims and the whole damned machinery of public discourse is being hijacked in broad daylight by people who shout “I’M BEING SILENCED” while holding megaphones. The question that naturally follows this is, what do we actually do about it then?

The old approaches are clearly not working anymore, diversity training sessions and earnest awareness campaigns bounce of this strategy like so much rain off an angry windscreen. We have to admit to ourselves that we can’t counter a deliberate, bad faith rhetorical game with sincere educational efforts when the game is designed to make sincerity look naive.

So, I do have some ideas:

• Hold the line. If something is racist, say so. If it’s xenophobic, say so. Don’t let them lure you into a meta-debate about the appropriateness of the word.

• Drag the spotlight back to the substance. Dissect what was actually said. Was it true? Or was it just prejudice in pearls?

• Reject the “cancel culture” frame. Remind people that no, being criticised is not, in fact, censorship. Being called out is not tyranny. Free speech does not mean freedom from consequences.

• Name the strategy for what it is. It’s not hypersensitivity or politeness, it's the slurification of racism and the self-victimisation to avoid being held to account.

Will this approach be foolproof and work every time? Almost certainly not - very few strategies ever work 100% of the time, and we have to keep in mind that the people who practice slurification have had many years to perfect their craft. Do you still need to be tactical in how you use these responses? Absolutely - there are, unfortunately, people like Fox still moseying around.

But the alternative - allowing words that describe bigotry and discrimination to become defanged, or even worse, more scandalous than the act itself, is far worse than the discomfort of a difficult conversation.

Words Have Power

I now come back to my original point - that words have power.

Which is exactly why there’s such a concerted effort to blunt and invert them, to make the label seem more dangerous than the act itself. We cannot let that succeed. The moment “racist” becomes unsayable while actual racism becomes unremarkable, we will have lost the fight long before it’s begun.

That’s the thread running through this marathon of a story today.

Jenrick, writing xenophobic copy in the Mail and then demanding apologies when someone dares call it what it is.

Grimes, making a racist “joke” and then pivoting into performance victimhood when people point it out.

Fox, dragging people through court because he believed being called racist was a worse slur than him branding others paedophiles.

Different men, same strategy.

The injustice in every case isn’t that they were called racist. The injustice is that they felt safe enough to be racist in the first place - and that the conversation is so quickly hijacked into a referendum on politeness rather than prejudice.

Unless we keep pushing back - firmly and unapologetically - the words that once named bigotry will become taboo, while the bigotry itself gets free rein, and once we reach that point, well - we’ll all be able to say things like “I’m not racist but…” while we watch the rot continue, politely, all the way down.