Sorry Steve but I don't really buy this. Black people famously use the N among each other but it's worth the incisors of a white person to chummily try to mimic it. There are probably those who say it's been "reclaimed."

AS lot of gay people do the same with "queer," nonchalantly using this abhorrent slur to refer to themselves (and me) in what they claim is a neutralization. This is is fermenting bullshit. This "reclamation" is just the latest form of that confrontational belligerence that hindered the achievement of equality. Earlier it was unadulterated bigotry toward heterosexuals ("breeders" in activist parlance). I dropped out of gay politics in the miod 90s after hearing too many who identified with the enclave culture and to whom assimilation was the dirtiest word in the language.

You say that racism is actually rare. Glad I was already sitting down when a read that because a motorbike accident around 2015 left me unsteady on my feet. Steve! Over 70 million people voted for Trump and their racism was the outstandingly strongest motivation; since Trump's bigotry is out in the open those people said "he's our guy," it wasn't economic anxiety.

American racism is intense, it is widespread, and its expression is intensifying. There is simple not enough social pressure against it as there is for rape and murder and that social pressure is the object of mockery among the right. "Safe spaces," "sensitivity training," "fuck your feelings.

OK, my answer IS draconian, but I stand by it. The only way to get bigotry, (which in America means murder, not just hurt feelings) out of our society is to break the generational transmission. I have little more to say about this and don't like repeating myself.

And your idea that sensitivity to the N is for black people to solve, sorry Steve, I'd walk through fire for you and you know it but that just sounds bizarre to me. When gay people call themselves "queer" they are saying yes, we ARE defective, yes, we ARE compulsive deviates.

There is a hypothesis in communications called Sapir-Whorf, with a weak and a strong form; the strong form says that ideas we don't have words for are inexpressible, even unthinkable; the weak form says that expression and thought are harder. The strong form doesn't have a lot of support.