April 10, 2026

I didn’t fully understand it then, but #RacismIsASickness was a conjuring.  Not just a phrase or a hashtag, but a naming.  And naming, I’ve learned, is never passive.

When I first began using those words back in 2015, I was trying to make sense of what I was carrying in my mind, body, soul and spirit.  What took form was an awareness of harm that didn’t always announce itself loudly; exhaustion that settled deep in the body; grief that didn’t always have a clear beginning or end. It was all there, moving through me, through us, often unspoken.

But the moment I named it, something shifted, because naming a thing gives it edges.

Naming pulled the formless from the shadows and fog, and placed it in my hands where I could turn it over, examine it, refuse it, or release it.  Naming it empowered me to speak on it through symbols like the inverted flag and the surgical masks. I wasn’t just expressing frustration—I was identifying a condition. Calling it what it is.

And in doing so, I found that I wasn’t alone.  Other people recognized it too. They felt it in their own bodies, their own lives. The naming became a kind of signal: you’re not imagining this. What you’re feeling has shape. It has weight. It has a name.

And somehow, that, for me, became a form of healing…not the kind that fixes everything overnight, but the kind of healing that steadied and grounded me. The kind that says: I see it clearly now. And because I see it, I can decide how it moves—or doesn’t move—through my life.

***

Truth be told, not much has changed in the world since I first named it. In many ways, what I feared has only deepened. The sickness has spread, mutated, revealed itself in ways that are both familiar and newly disturbing.

But I have changed.

My clarity has sharpened.

My relationship to what I see, what I feel, and what I refuse has evolved.

Naming it didn’t cure the world.

But it interrupted something in me.

It gave me language where there had been silence.

And sometimes, healing begins right there—

with the courage to say, without flinching:  this is what it is.

***

These days, I pay closer attention to what I name and what I leave untouched.

Because I’ve seen what happens when something sits too long without language—it grows, distorts, convinces you it belongs there.

And I’m no longer interested in carrying things that haven’t been properly identified.

So I name them.

Carefully. Honestly. Sometimes reluctantly.

But I name them anyway.

And I find myself wondering—

What are the things we’ve been living with that we haven’t yet named?

What have we explained away, minimized, or folded into “just the way things are”?

And what might shift—not in the world, but within us—if we had the courage to call those things exactly what they are?