we realize there is no bottom rung that is not already occupied by another black person, and, therefore, we make new niggers of them. If, as Toni Morrison says, it is on the backs of blacks that America has been built, then surely blacks have built other forms of blackness, acceptable blackness, by offering nigger status to those we deem beneath us. As surely as fringe black figures like right-wing ideologue Rev. Jesse Peterson see the black poor as niggers, some religious blacks see queer folk the same way. We can’t seem to shake our hypocrisy, and thus end up mimicking the whiteness we claim
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