Before anyone called me a Grand Wizard, they called me
NIGGERLIPS.
I was a kid in a suburb of Buffalo, New York, in a neighborhood where nobody escaped ridicule. Everyone had a nickname. The gauntlet was universal and merciless — that was the culture of the place, and in some ways it was democratic. But the slurs that stick are the ones attached to things you cannot change. Buck teeth. A pronounced overbite. Lips that were larger than the suburban norm and accentuated by the dental situation. These were the features I was born with, inherited from whatever confluence of German immigrant genetics produced my family in western New York.
Niggerlips. The word arrived early and lodged itself permanently — not because I accepted what it implied about me, but because it taught me something specific about how contempt works. The slur didn't require the target to be Black. It required only a physical feature that could be associated with Blackness and then weaponized. The cruelty was not about race in any coherent sense. It was about designation — the assignment of a category to a person based on something they could not control, followed by the social enforcement of that category through repetition.

