As I’ve written elsewhere, several times, having been the target of a rapist, nothing angers me faster than someone calling me a “victim”. I was a target – not a victim. It may seem a small, even inconsequential thing, but the dictionary makes these differences crystal clear.

Target: a person, object, or place selected as the aim of an attack.

Victim: a person harmed, injured, or killed as a result of a crime, accident, or other event or action.

When John Doe aims his gun, he is aiming at a target; there is nothing accidental about it - right? Just as a victim and a target are completely different, a victim mentality and the mentality of a target are completely different. While targets try to avoid people who are targeting them, victims are trying to avoid accidents and dangerous activities.

To say, that black people were, or are, victims is to place the blame on the innocent. Isn’t it time to place the blame on those who target innocent people?

Black people were the targets of slaveholders (not their victims). Likewise, black people were, and still are, the targets of deliberate and calculated actions which include Jim Crow, disenfranchisement, lynchings, redlining, profiling, ghettoization, segregation, mass incarceration, etc.

Of course, those are just my thoughts. People are welcome to critique my thinking, or use of language, but do not, ever, call me a victim.