Newt Gingrich has offered a grudging apology to Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor for calling the judge a racist. Here it is, from his Human Events column:

"Shortly after President Obama nominated her to a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court, I read Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s now famous words: 'I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life.' My initial reaction was strong and direct -- perhaps too strong and too direct.  The sentiment struck me as racist and I said so. Since then, some who want to have an open and honest consideration of Judge Sotomayor’s fitness to serve on the nation’s highest court have been critical of my word choice. With these critics who want to have an honest conversation, I agree.  The word 'racist' should not have been applied to Judge Sotomayor as a person, even if her words themselves are unacceptable (a fact which both President Obama and his Press Secretary, Robert Gibbs, have since admitted)."

I don't want to defend Gingrich, but his initial use of the R word is part of a larger slippage of precision about the definitions of "racist" and "racism."  In the 1960s, it was pretty clear who was a racist: an anti-black bigot, a segregationist (George Wallace) or a beliver in the innate mental superiority of one race (usually the white race) to others. Then the fudging began.

The initial blame belongs to the left, which liked to talk about "institutional racism." To borrow some legal jargon used in civil-rights cases, this established an "effects" test for racism rather than an "intent" test. If an institution (the military, higher education, the polity) is racist because its policies or folkways disproportionately disadvantage members of a particular race, they are "racist." This more encompassing connotation provided a short-term polemical advantage for liberals, but at the cost of diluting the original meaning of the term. The easier it is to cry "Racism," the less those accused of it will be stigmatized. If everyone's a racist, no one is.

But conservatives must share the blame for watering down "racist," again to score political points. I'm referring to the notion, dear to opponents of affirmative action, that racial preferences benefiting blacks or other Americans amount to "racism in reverse." This view is reflected in Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.'s view that a program that takes race into account for the purposes of educating black and white children in the same classroom is just as invidious as the segregated schools struck down in Brown vs. Board of Education. 

Rush Limbaugh at least acknowledged the sliver of difference between the two concepts  when he attacked Sotomayor: "Here you have a racist – you might want to soften that, and you might want to say a reverse racist." But even the "reverse" qualifier distorts an important difference between old and new "racism."  Take Sotomayor's "wise Latina" comment. OK, it does assert that, in some cases at least, the wise Latina would out-judge the white male judge. But that supposed superiority has nothing to do with the argument of old-style racists that God or evolution had made whites smarter than other races.

It isn't just "racist" that has lost its sting through overuse. So has "homophobic." Here's a quotation from a primer from the The Campaign to End Homophobia: "Institutional homophobia refers to the many ways in which government, businesses, churches, and other institutions and organizations discriminate against people on the basis of sexual orientation."

I'll close with a thought experiment: If combatants in political and cultural wars were forbidden to use the R word, would they have to be more specific about their assertions? I think so, but we'll never know. Now I just hope that no one calls this post "racist."

* Photo of Newt Gingrich by Mary Ann Chastain / AP file