But prejudice has always been bad. It’s just that racism, especially the racism that resulted from centuries of chattel slavery, is worse. It’s a lot worse. It’s something that can be studied through multiple lenses/fields, politics (colonization, authoritarianism), psychology (identity formation, PTSD), law (red-lining, jim crow, mass incarceration) economics (no business loans from banks, racist hiring practices), philosophy (justice, freedom, epistemology), sociology, anthropology, etc.

People don’t really fear being called a slur on the street as much as they fear being seen as less than human by our society and shared institutions.