>And do racist insults cause no harm? The isolated one, probably not.
>But how often are racist insults isolated? They're usually part of a
>pattern of speech that's embedded in a social hierarchy. The speech
>both reflects and reinforces the hierarchy. That's not harmless.
Here's an anecdotal example of how deeply imbedded the power of racist insults is here. A friend of mine is a mental health worker in San Francisco. Once she was with a patient from a group home where people were, theoretically anyway, transitioning from institutional to semi-independent living. My friend was on a weekly outing with this patient and they were riding on the bus. As he generally did when he was out in public for more than just a little while, this guy was getting increasingly agitated. And, as he also often did when out in public, he proceeded to make the situation worse by starting to yell "n-word, n-word, n-word" out of nowhere. Long story short, at the next stop my friend is scurrying to get this guy off the bus and away from riders who took great offense at this outburst. She wound up shoving the guy into a phone booth, throwing her arms across the door and yelling "he's mentally ill, he's mentally ill." That problem solved, the next problem was the guy obsessing for the rest of the day about my friend calling him mentally ill.