> “I suggest the actual reason is that the vast majority of people continue to tacitly agree that it maintain its power.”
It still seems you really are committed to this point of view, that the word has power only because people continue to agree to a social convention of assigning power to the word. But I think this still continues to miss the point.
It’s not at all about whether enough people choose to assign power to the word so as to force everyone at large to deal with it as a social issue. That’s a selfish way to look at it, like your free speech is your lawn and some punk kids drove their n-word social convention onto your lawn, and you’re yelling “get off my lawn” (as in, make this convention about this word go away). Thinking about it this way, the focus seems to be your freedom to say certain syllables without having to acknowledge any broader historical context about them.
But instead consider that the word, apart from any chosen modern social agenda, does represent a huge and unsolved systemic discrimination and repression towards black people. It does so because of its historical meaning, the contexts within which it has been primarily used, and the clear usage as a racial slur spoken predominantly by white America towards black America.
These are just the facts and context of the word, which we can look at and step back a second and say, well shit, a whole lot of those deviant racism problems are still going on today. And so maybe we ought to be sensitive and respectful and careful about its usage.
This isn’t a social convention to give the word power. It’s not just held up by some stereotypes of progressivism just itching for something to be offended by. It’s an encoding that is highly related to racism problems that are still severe and still on-going and so treating that word, among a variety of types of hateful slurs, with sensitivity is a lot more about acknowledging that than it is about enshrining some syllables with a progressive agenda status.
Overall, if this slightly limits your vocabulary or your ability to use it as a type of shock humor or something — well, that doesn’t seem that important by comparison. It’s not just some people agreeing “well word X is OK for crass humor, but word Y is off limits” ... rather it’s off limits because it commands a basic respect for certain on-going racist aspects of our reality.
Maybe one day long after our current systemic racism has stopped, future people will look back at racial slurs of this era as silly words whose context they don’t understand, and are free to joke about. Sort of how we could look at British insults of the Shakespearean era, or insults of the American Revolutionary War (“turncoats”, “lobsterbacks”), and not feel the intense political charge and visceral hatefulness they evoked at the time of their origination. To us they are silly words.
But that’s because the specific contextual meaning is not still going on, day to day, with visceral consequences for people in their daily lives. But for the racism contextualized by the n-word, it absolutely is still going on.