SERIAL is an organization of people who recognize and want to do something about the insidious role often played by language in creating, transmitting and sustaining a racial bias mindset in its users. This it may do, for instance, as does English, by employing the same terminology, such as “black” and “white”, that usually refer to particular races, as adjectives denoting either “bad” or “good” in figurative situations such as we find in expressions like “black sheep” and “black spot“, “white knight” and “white list”. We at SERIAL believe that imbibing this resulting “blackness of bad/whiteness of good” narrative over a period must surely create in the users of the language, whether consciously or subconsciously, a mindset that shuns “black” things while favoring those designated as “white”, thereby, wittingly or otherwise, laying the foundation for systemic racism.

The narrative, moreover, carries an implicit endorsement of a hierarchy of races: one in which the white race sits at the top or “good” end, the black at the bottom or “bad” end, and the others fit in-between, according to their perceived closeness to either of the end occupants!

What we do at SERIAL, therefore, is to identify, and then campaign for the elimination of, those aspects of language that systemically malign other races and thereby encourage the emergence, consciously or subconsciously, of a racial bias mindset against such other race or races. The aim ultimately is to achieve parity for all human races by rendering all race-denoting terminology, such as “black” and “white”, “value-neutral” in language. For practical reasons, initial concentration has to be on the most influential languages, such as English, because of their reach and impact on global society. Thus, as far as the English language is concerned, we stand specifically for the elimination of the figurative use of the terms “black” and “white” in which the former invariably denotes “bad” and the latter “good”. #Bad Is Not Black & Vice Versa!