> As noted, I consider Reginald Hunter's opinion -- he thinks you, me, he, and everyone else should use the word a lot in order to remove / defuse its power. F

> As noted, I consider Reginald Hunter's opinion -- he thinks you, me, he, and everyone else should use the word a lot in order to remove / defuse its power. For future reference, this is a stupid idea. Certain words have derogatory "power" towards a group because there remains groups of real people who still possess possess real prejudice towards that group and want to dehumanize that group. Nobody cares if you call somebody a "Neanderthal" (extremely offensive, Neanderthals likely possessed an older and more refined culture than the hyperaggressive saipiens) but go to Japan and start talking about "Shina" or go to Germany and use "untermensch" and the fascists will come crawling out of the woodwork like ants drawn to sugar. There is no reason to believe that using words a lot would remove their power. Instead, history as shown again and again (open a book for gods sakes), normalizing such language only empowers the fascist elements and silences the victims. Normalizing these words is a prelude to bloodshed precisely because they are the leading edge in a real campaign to dehumanize real people. There's a reason the German pre-war press often referred to the traitorous Jews, the Rwandan radio stations often referred to Tutsis as cockroaches and Trump refers to immigrants as animals and rapists. This isn't about "political correctness," this is about removing real people from society.