a moment of clarity.

words.

"But "nigger" is also just a word. If it had never issued from a man's mouth, you can be damn sure the boats and the whips and the chains would've kept on coming. There would've been just as many shootings and hangings and draggings and pummelings and hackings in a "nigger"-less America, and we'd be having an earnest and altogether useless debate today about the propriety of using some other word, and we'd still be mistaking the symptoms for the disease.

That's part of the history, too, though—the non-reckoning. Reconstruction was less a nationwide effort to repair a broken country than a synchronized effort to dismiss the past, and among its legacies was a century and change of trying to sidestep the issue. We don't want to talk about any of that. It's uncomfortable; it's painful; it brings up incredibly complex questions about how we right wrongs that, however much they affect us today, were committed before our grandparents were born and that are in some ways baked into the system. Strange as it was, Common's introduction—written by ESPN's professional Southerner, Wright Thompson—got at the issue better than anything that transpired in the actual discussion. To reckon with "nigger," the piece understood, you have to reckon with history.

What is that history? It's slavery, and a campaign of apartheid and ethnic cleansing, and six million African-Americans fleeing the racially segregated South to Northern and Western cities in search of freedom and opportunity and many of them ending up in isolated ghettos... It hasn't changed much nearly a century later, and the story isn't much different in our other major cities. This is what Ta-Nehisi Coates means when he invokes the "half-assed social contract" handed down to black people, the way we ignore that America turned its own citizens into a refugee population."

DEADSPIN: What ESPN And The NFL Don't Talk About When They Talk About "Nigger"