“Cuck” reared its head during the Trump presidency as one of the favorite insults among white conservatives deployed against other white people who they felt were not conservative enough. As a shorthand for “cuckold”—taken from an Old French term referring to the cuckoo’s habit of laying its eggs in another bird’s nest—this term comes with racist and pornographic undertones that white men use to transmute their fears about loss of institutional and racial power into a weapon. Derived from a popular pornographic scenario in which a white man is cuckolded by, and obliged to watch, a Black “bull”
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