Beloved, I am not arguing there is evil magic in white lips to call down violence with words. The word nigger has such fantastically evil resonance because there is a kind of moral onomatopoeia at work: nigger is a word that comes as close as any to suggesting the racial violence that it describes. Nigger says lynching, castration, rape, rioting, intellectual inferiority, Jim Crow, second-class citizenship, bad schools, poor neighborhoods, police brutality, racial terror, mass incarceration, and more. Nigger has no rival. There is no rough or refined equivalence between the term and the many
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