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 derisive references to white folk. Those terms don’t evoke singularly gruesome actions. Nigger is unique because the menace it implies is portable; it shows up wherever a white tongue is willing to suggest intimidation and destruction. There are no examples of black folk killing white people en
...more
