INEVITABLY, last week's flap over John Derbyshire, the contributor National Review Online fired for penning a reprehensible column full of racial animus at another magazine, ended up provoking conversations about the use of the term "racism". Quite a number of people draw a distinction between believing (misguidedly) that there are innate disparities in intelligence or behaviour between the races as we conventionally think of them in American society, and believing (malevolently) that these differences should lead to different treatment by government or society. Others, meanwhile, think that this distinction is a transparent, self-serving ruse that allows people motivated by deep-seated racial bias and resentment to excuse their beliefs. Mr Derbyshire's column itself was prompted by the aftermath of the killing of Trayvon Martin, which has led many people to talk about the significance of persistent racism in America, while others have argued that racism is not relevant to that case because neither the killer nor the cops who failed to arrest him are obviously racist. This leads us into discussions of structural racism, where the effects of Florida's "stand your ground" law are racist because of latent assumptions by non-black civilians, police and juries that make blacks more likely to be shot, and their killers to be exonerated. And so on.

Now, when I was comin' up, sonny, in a not entirely lily-white neighbourhood in Washington, DC, we didn't talk much about racism. I mean, we mostly talked about "Star Wars". But when kids did talk about racial issues in the late 1970s, generally in the context of "Roots" or Lando Calrissian or whether the kids from the Catholic school were tougher than us (yes) or whether we would vote for Marion Barry for mayor (whatever that was), we didn't use the word "racism"; we used the word "prejudice". That new kid? He's prejudiced. Hey dorkus, you prejudiced? I'm not prejudiced! Oh yeah, why'd he say you were? Do you think white people are better than black people? Are you prejudiced against me? And so on, through the interminable rituals of legalistic nyah-nyahing, group dominance struggles, and occasional violence that comprise elementary-school playground life. The word had filtered down to us from the national discourse of Carter-era America, and having a basic sense that this was the moral agenda of the day, we employed it in a usually warped fashion as grounds for the confused early stabs at self-regulation and elaboration of norms that occupy much of one's behaviour at that age.

At some point in the 1980s, "prejudice" receded from the lexicon in favour of "racism". Perhaps it was the nature of the incidents that caused racial flare-ups in the 1980s: "prejudice" seems inadequate to describe what motivated Bernhard Goetz or the kids in Howard Beach. Maybe it was a need for thematic simplicity, a desire to maintain a link to the literal racism of South African apartheid, or a political-aesthetic tendency to torque up the accusation. (Imagine Chuck D exhorting people to "fight the power" by calling Elvis "racially prejudiced".) In any case, I wonder whether this was not a mistake. The word "racism" invites dispute because it is simultaneously a much graver accusation, and a less specific one. Is it "racist" simply to believe in the biological existence of races correlated with normatively valorised characteristics such as intelligence and propensity for violence? Does "racist" imply the belief that government and society should actively do something about racial differences? Or does "racist" simply mean someone who feels a sense of allegiance to their own race and treats other races oppositionally, quite apart from any fact-based beliefs they may hold? Many on the left want the term to apply to anyone who spends a lot of time talking about racial IQ comparisons, while retaining the full opprobrium of "racist" in the Nazi sense. Many on the right want the term to apply only to people who openly treat other races as the enemy, while excusing the obvious and classically coded racial resentment that almost universally accompanies supposedly neutral, data-based claims of racial disparities.

I think the term "racial prejudice" evades a lot of these pitfalls. Whatever else Mr Derbyshire's column was, it was prima facie a document that both displayed and advocated racial prejudice. Mr Derbyshire says he literally advised his children to pre-judge black people, to treat them differently than white people based on the colour of their skin. In the Trayvon Martin case, use of the term "racism" leaves a lot of people wondering who the racist is supposed to be. The case that the shooting involved "racial prejudice", that things were vanishingly unlikely to turn out the same way if Mr Martin had been white, is much easier to make. Racial prejudice embraces most of the situations we talk about when we talk about racial conflicts these days.

The down side to this switch is that pretty much everyone is racially prejudiced to some degree. You're using a word that has less condemnatory power, and that many people can envision including themselves. Then again, this, to me, is really the point. The Trayvon Martin case is important not because it suggests that lots of people are actively racist, but because it shows that institutions and rules that fail to account for the fact that most people are tacitly prejudiced can ultimately strip those on the receiving end of that prejudice of their most basic rights.