Mah Nish-Ta-Nig-Ger Layh-Lah Ha-Zeh Mi-Kol Ha-Lay-Loht?

Why is this word different from all other words?

What gives the word Nigger such tremendous, terror-inducing power? I mean, it fucking SQUASHES all competitors:

• Kike
• Faggot
• Gook
• even first runner up CUNT can't say jack shit.

Nope; Nigger is the all-out-king, like JA One XTC, or oldschool '87 pre-earbiting Mike Tyson – it crushes bitches without remorse, and terrifies white people from 100 yards away...Come to think of it, as far as the reactions of fear they provoke, '87 Mike Tyson and the word Nigger have a lot in common...

Looks like I got a thesis:

The word Nigger's dominance as the universal champion of taboo is directly caused by the ass-beating that is feared by its usage.

(...and not the other way around.)

As for the dominance itself, I don't think I have to convince you that our society holds the N word to be much more taboo than any of those other slurs – but just in case:

Consider the Michael Richards Hubub: Can you imagine a comparable federal calamity occurring if Richards had been shouting kyke? I mean yeah, he would have been chastised, sure, and Simon Wiesenthal would have sent an email to your grandparents and their Bridge partners, and they would have forwarded it with their broken CAPS LOCKs to all their liberal New York grandchildren who would roll their eyes and check it against snopes before squirting out patronizing and self-righteous replies... but can you ever imagine a scene quite like this one occurring, with Michael Richards apologizing on Letterman and looking just about as terrified as a man headed for the electric chair? Think they still would have made him a national villain, with a movement of Jewish leaders launching a stop-the-K-word website and T-shirts and a funeral for the K word?

Nigga please.

So you were right – what you knew instinctively is obviously true: Nigger is way "worse" than all these other words. At first I wasn't sure why, so I asked my mother.

Hey Mom: ma-nish-ta-nig?

It's the fact that people in this country owned slaves and that they institutionally subjugated an entire race - it was a word used to refer to slaves; inhuman merchandise - it was not a slur. Think of Huckleberry Finn - this was reportage - "Did anyone get hurt? Nah, killed a nigger though." This country holds responsibility for that, and that's why Americans place such importance on the N word.

Yeah mom, that's pretty fucked up...But the only 6th generation Americans I know are black! My other best friends are mostly jewish, and they were too busy running from Cossacks to be worried about the slave trade in North America. So I'm not buying that they shoulder the responsibility for slavery because of their skin color... but I do know they're scared to say nigger!

I'm just not buying that the horrors of slavery are what make the N word so taboo. The origins make it a FUCKED UP word, very nasty indeed, but by taboo I'm talking about why people are so afraid to say it. People say VERY VERY fucked up shit all the time, right? So why not this word?

Now call me simple, but to me it's obvious: people are afraid to say nigger because they don't wanna get they asses whooped. That's the only reason nigger beats all those other slurs - you WILL get your ass beat harder and more quickly for using that word than any other.

White people: think of getting caught saying nigger on an A-train packed with scaryblacks. Imagine the fucking violent negro-forearm beat down you'd get? Scream nigger at Jay Street Borough Hall: Your life expectancy will be so fucking short you'll make Sam Metteer look like Michael Phelps.

Now, for contrast, imagine the punishment you'd receive for uttering the respective slurs of the other marginalized groups in their natural habitats:

Women - Go scream CUNT in a shoe store. You'll get screamed at, and worse comes to worse some gigantic kangol-wearing dyke will shove your ass out onto the street. What the fuck ever: compare that shit to getting shivved on the A-train at 155th and St. Nick.

Gays - Go scream FAGGOT at a Gay Pride Parade. Ha! They'll probably just mock you and twirl their pinwheel breast-tassles in your direction. In certain circumstances, like if you were at the fucking Blue Oyster Bar, you could certainly get your ass severely beat (See Eddie Murphy's cannonized "That's some embarrassing shit to get beat up by a faggot" bit from Delirious / Comedian, 1983) but it'd be much rarer. It would take much more specific conditions to really get your ass beat bloody, whereas saying Nigger loudly on pretty much any A-train will immediately cause you to die.

Jews - Go scream KYKE at Zabars or Barney Greengrass. You're gonna get a lot of hairy shouting and huge bobbing Adam's Apples in your face and shit – like the POV scene from Clockwork Orange when all the old muthafuckas are beating my man's ass – but aside from some neck clawmarks or a pot of tzimmes to the nuts, you're walkin outta there unscathed.

Asians - This is the one example that most challenges my thesis, though in the end my thesis escapes as unscathed as an anti-semite shouting "Gimme a quarter pound of kyke" at H&H.

Now, having grown up on Game of Death and Fists of Fury, I know that from a hand-to-hand combat perspective, the chinamen can very much kick the FUCK outta a nigga just using bare hands and those ballet shoes. They can even defeat large men of African descent - Doubters plz review the scene in Enter The Dragon right before the claw battle.

But here's the thing - despite their karate abilities, I just don't get the sense that asians would use this power just because you called one of them a gook. Like the man himself, I get the sense that asians subscribe to a higher moral ethos and obey The Spiderman Credo - whereas niggas on the A train are just waiting for someone to breathe on them wrong so they can rip a caucasian arm out of a socket, tear off the fingers, and sell dem shits in the next car like black truant 13-year-olds slangin' fake batteries to raise money for their imaginary basketball team.

Listen, let's be honest: most people fear black people more than any other race besides sleeper-cell arabs (and that's different). Just consider this observation you've made hundreds of times before, and be fucking honest about it for once:

You see a group of white kids fucking around on the subway, e.g. peeling off MTA stickers, or drawing on a subway map, or cursing loudly, or some shit like that. White bystanders will almost always step to them:

Excuse me kids, can you not deface public property? Cut it out, come on, GROW up, I'm a taxpayer, ok? That's my freakin money, bigshot, okay?

Now consider a bunch of loud-ass ebonics black kids doing the same thing?? Nigga PLEASE; NO ONE will say shit - white people start lookin down and explorin they newspapers so hard you'd think they was Lewis AND Clark.

Even other blacks stay mum. Everyone lets those kids do whatever the fuck they want. Know why? Cause people are scared of scaryblacks! And statistically it's not without foundation: In greater proportion than any other race, blacks are known to have numerous representatives that are big, strong, aggressive, and ready to throw down. (McCarthyistic Politically Correct deniers of this fact, click here to suck my dick)

So the real explanation for the N-word's championship spot in the McCarthyism 2.0 censorship hierarchy is plain as black-and-white: More so than any other race, ethnicity, or subgroup, people are terrified of getting their asses severely beaten by big strong angryblacks. The word nigger is known to piss the SHIT out of potentially violent, often severely racist black people, many of whom may be looking for a fight. Therefore, in a self-fulfilling prophesy, Americans in urban centers wisely avoid the N word like the fucking plagues; All Santa-Claus-ass imaginary ten.