Weird Kid

She was never that kind of hurt that you could decorate into paper flowers and glitter stars and just forget.

She was the pain that lingered after a long day of work, trying to bury yourself on the papers on your desk, when you'd had your last cup of coffee and were staring blankly at the television trying to drown yourself into the noise.

She was the pain that stayed when you got into bed after days of sleeping on the couch and stared at your ceilings and wondered, when you transitioned from glow-in-the-dark planets to a blank, absurd, too sterile white mess.

I really don't understand how non-Black people find it so hard to restrain themselves from saying the N-word. It really is so simple, and it’s not a complex subject at all.

As someone who’s queer—meaning they're oppressed in one way—and also has class privilege, meaning they can be silent oppressors in other ways, I definitely get why this word is so triggering for some people, especially in the Black community. It’s a deeply inhumane thing to call someone if you’re not Black.

For example, as a queer person, many of us are called “fags,” you know, as an insult—“faggots,” “dykes.” That kind of language is unacceptable coming from straight or cis people. But as queers, when we use these words with each other, it’s a way of healing and reclaiming a part of our identity. It’s speaking up and resisting. It’s like saying, yeah, you call me a slur—but I won’t back down, and it doesn’t hurt me. Even if it did, reclaiming the word gives us power over it. If “faggot” means I’m a weird queer guy, then yeah, I own that. It’s not insulting.

However, if a straight person uses that word toward a queer person, they’re basically saying, “I don’t respect you as queer, and this is my way of insulting you.” It’s a shallow, hurtful attack.

Here’s another example: I have class privilege. I have domestic help in my house—labor in India is cheap, and the gap between my wealth and theirs is huge. I’m extremely sensitive to that. If I started calling them “poor” or “toilet cleaners” or something awful like that—which I would never do, but as an example—that would be deeply triggering and traumatizing for them.

If that happened repeatedly, maybe they would reclaim those words, saying, “Yes, we are poor, and we’re not ashamed. We do this work, and we’re not ashamed.” Using those words themselves could become an act of resistance, a rebellion against the system.

Similarly, when non-Black people—especially white people—started using the N-word toward Black people, because they were forcibly taken from Africa and enslaved in America, it became an extremely offensive and hateful slur. It’s deeply triggering to those who come from that history.

Now, when Black artists, rappers, or others reclaim that word, saying, “Yes, we’re from this heritage. We were enslaved, but we’re proud of who we are,” that’s different. Non-Black people haven’t lived those experiences or inherited that trauma. And since the slur was used only by non-Black oppressors, if a non-Black person says it now, it just shows disrespect and a desire to be offensive.