It’s not a hip-hop catch phrase or even a slur that some coward spray-paints on a wall. It’s a word of violence. It’s a word they say when they raise their torches and rally around statues of slave owners. It’s a word that has one aim: to dehumanize us and turn us into something less than a person so we are easier to kill, easier to drag behind a truck, easier to dump into a lake, easier to shoot in the back. That’s all it is. It’s a word that erodes our humanity, a means to an end, and that end is our death.
