this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2026
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Props to him, but the text on the shirt is a little forced.
"evil" would had sufficed.
I thought exactly that. Opened the post, upvoted this thread.
However couldn't not Google it, and it may be on purpose.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/evilness
While it does sound better with just "evil", I wonder if they wished to exactly convey that what is being created is the quality of being evil in some people. All in all, that goes under the umbrella of evil, sure. But if we replace "evilness" with "badness", it no longer sounds worse than the alternative, just "inequality creates bad". Ofc you can't compare directly like that, I'm just trying to make the point that black civil activist haven't historically been that bad at language use, so perhaps we're just feeling the more colloquial version but that this may be prescriptively better, idk.
I'm no languinolologist.
Badness sounds even worser
Yeah, but not worse than just "bad", whereas "evilness" sounds worse compared to just "evil."
My point is that it might not the most colloquial of English use, but MLK Jr didn't exactly speak vernacular either.
So just because something sounds a tad off doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong. And in a lot of cases it's the opposite, because languages just keep evolving.
Evilitude?
That's more of a neologism, whereas "evilness" veers more toward the archaic.