Historical Origins

The historical origins of a practice are often objectively irrelevant to the core nature of an action.  Concepts, unlike what many seem to believe according to their literal words, cannot actually be created, only discovered through logic and miscellaneous prompting.  Their nature is fixed.  Practices can be created in the sense that they are established by actually being carried out, with no shortage of possible motives for the very same behavior.  And the intentions lurking behind why someone first enacted a policy or performed a given action might significantly differ from why other individuals might do very the same things.  Logically, concrete examples are irrelevant to the truth of this fact, though examples abound.  

The philosophy behind the original implementation of the SAT was thoroughly racist, though there is nothing about a standardized test inherently associated with racial discrimination.  Therefore, administering them is not racist by default (although it can alternatively be used to promote the erroneous conflation of education/test performance with intelligence).  Having a lawn was once the domain of the very wealthy, who could afford to "waste" arable land for the sake of cultivating or showing off an aesthetic.  Paying workers to upkeep this surplus, unfarmed land only added to the barriers separating such landowners from the poor.  Obviously, a classist rich person might naturally have thought their lawn reflected their mythical superiority over the less prosperous.

Would origins of lawn maintenance in this historical context mean you are classist if you desire to have a lawn, and a well-maintained one at that?  No.  As pointless as having and caring about a specifically-arranged lawn is beyond subjective satisfaction left to itself, having property of this kind, displaying it to others, and perhaps even taking a degree of pride in its maintenance does not require that someone thinks highly of themself or less of other people on the basis of anything related to lawn or general land ownership.  The same irrelevance is true of words; just because a separate individual meant something illogical or evil by a certain word, however recently or long ago, has nothing to do with what someone might mean by it today.

The historical origins fallacy, as I will call it here, is exactly what some who call themselves Christians scramble to commit regarding things like Easter or Christmas.  Allegedly, these holidays have purely pagan origins, and allegedly, if this was the case historically, then anyone who celebrates them today must be participating in pagan activity.  Really, independent of historical customs and the intentions of other people, it would not matter on one level if a moderner used Christmas trees for seasonal decorative purposes entirely unrelated to pagan belief, commitment, or practice.  Just as a having a lawn and appreciating its aesthetic maintenance does not make anyone classist, merely having a Christmas tree does not make one a pagan adherent or a hypocritical syncretist.

Historical origins truly do not matter anywhere near as much as some might be easily manipulated into believing when they experience emotional revulsion at someone else's intentions for practices they conduct, although this has no direct connection with their own behaviors as an individual.  Many things might have once been utilized for the sake of sexism, racism, classism, ageism, or paganism, among other things, but they are not logically tied to such philosophical ideas or the personal motivations derived from them.  The vital issue is whether something is itself racist, pagan, and so on.  The truth about the matter is then very easy to ascertain, for one only needs to consult reason to see what is necessarily true about the thing in question.