Leadership Quote by Artur Davis

Artur Davis’s line lands like a polite reprimand with a sharp edge: the South talks about race so constantly, so reflexively, that even the basic color terms have become exhausted weapons. Calling “black” and “white” “overused” isn’t a plea for colorblindness so much as an indictment of a regional habit of reducing everything - schools, neighborhoods, crime, voting, even manners - to a two-column ledger. The critique is linguistic on purpose. Davis is pointing at how language doesn’t just describe Southern life; it scripts it, preloading conversations with conflict before anyone gets to facts.

The subtext is tactical and personal. As a Black Southern politician, Davis is signaling fluency in the region’s codes while challenging the payoff those codes deliver: tribal alignment, moral shortcuts, easy scapegoats. “Our vocabulary” matters, too. He’s not lecturing the South from a coastal balcony; he’s implicating himself and his audience in a shared rhetorical addiction. That inclusive “our” softens the accusation just enough to make it harder to dismiss.

Contextually, the remark fits a post-civil-rights, pre-post-racial moment when public life was trying to modernize its tone while keeping old structures intact. By framing race talk as stale repetition, Davis suggests the problem isn’t merely prejudice as a private feeling; it’s race as a default organizing principle, endlessly rehearsed until it feels like common sense. The line works because it exposes that rehearsal. It asks: what could the South talk about - or build - if it stopped reaching for the same two words first?