I feel the same way Penguin. I wrote this response to his article, which is more like variations on his themes. Hope you don't mind if I Piggyback on your comment. For some reason. Medium won't let me comment on the original article.

A commenter called Quasimodo mentions Bob Fosse’s Film about Lenny Bruce, in which Bruce makes pretty much the same point you are making here. Bruce had a routine in which he used the N-word, followed by every other racial/cultural epithet for Jews, Italians, Poles etc. He then argued that if we are willing to use these words we can rob them of their power. Bruce got jailed for this attitude in the 50s. This made him a secular saint in 60s, when many of us believed that true freedom was achieved only by saying the unspeakable, and showing the unshowable. George Carlin and Richard Pryor were considered to have an equal right to use the N-word. John Lennon wrote a song with the N-word in the title. When R. Crumb, Ralph Bakshi and the National Lampoon made cartoons containing racist caricatures, this was seen as a way of ridiculing racists. Many of us believed at the time that there was something like a moral obligation to acknowledge that a joke was funny, even when it was racist or sexist or cruel, or just disgusting. The ability to laugh at what were called “Sick Jokes” was seen as a kind of authenticity or integrity. It reflected the ability to own and acknowledge even the darkest parts of your personality.

Perhaps wokeness is the children of the Hippies rebelling against the outspokenness of their parents. These things do happen in cycles. The Victorian era was a similar rebellion against the sensuality of the 18th century. This time around, however, the banned words are usually racial not sexual. Once TV couples had to sleep in separate beds, now Netflix and HBO are filled with fucking, both the word and the action. But Racism and Sexism have become the new Taboos, and Progressivism is now defined by the search for new words and actions to ban, rather than by new bans to break.

We were wrong about a lot of things in the 60s, and to some degree this was one of them. I think it is important to rewrite the rules of courtesy so that they don’t just accommodate the feelings of the privileged. We privileged assumed that marginalized people found these jokes as funny as we did. We were probably wrong about that, (but I won’t be sure until I’ve heard from those who were actually alive at the time.) My generation of feminists demanded that they not be treated like delicate flowers, and that men should not have to worry about what they said just because “Ladies are present.” Unfortunately, when men were given the freedom to say whatever they liked, this put women in a position that made many of them feel constantly under threat of assault. The daughters of these women grew up to have zero tolerance of anything resembling romantic banter in the work place.

But your main point is crucial: banning words makes the words more powerful and the marginalized less powerful. I’m happy to ban the N-word. I always thought it was disgusting, and never wanted to be anywhere near anyone who said it. But every new word added to the ban list creates one more weapon for bigots. Some Alt-right groups have now managed to create a similar sense of vulnerability and outrage from a circular finger sign and a cartoon of a frog. I had a black student come to me in tears because she overheard some white students use the word “Negro”. ( I’m assuming that word is okay to mention but not use in this essay, just as the N-word must be neither mentioned nor used?) I recently saw an article about a student group who protested that a course description frequently contained the word “N-word”. Not the N-word referred to by the word “N-Word”, but just the word “N-word”.

You can see this same trend in sexual euphemisms. Once they’ve been repeatedly used, they become as sexy as the symbols they were covering up. So new symbols have to be coined, which eventually become as sexy as the originals, and so on until every symbolic act becomes sexy. The Victorians got so sex-obsessed by trying to repress sexual expression that eventually the word “leg” became taboo, and chair legs had to be covered up with doilies. Each banned expression about marginalized groups creates a similar sensitivity to the expressions that are left, which leads to more banned expressions and so on. Because blackface in minstrel shows contributed heavily to the dehumanization of African-Americans, it is equally wrong for White performers to wear black face while portraying one of Shakespeare’s noblest, most courageous tragic heroes. Next we infer that we must condemn a Canadian prime minister for wearing black make-up while costumed as a mythological South Asian prince. This tendency, which I call “Trigger-Creep”, is an inescapable fact of human psychology. Our minds are what Andy Clark calls associative engines, and if left unchecked, they will find ways of relating everything to everything else.

Suppose that the number of words that need to be censored in order to maintain a truly just and compassionate society is manageable, even if it is time-consuming and exhausting? Don’t we have a moral obligation to do the censoring? Not unless it is helping to eliminate racism, and I don’t think it does. I’m not terribly interested in bringing any particular banned symbols back. I’m just saying that your not going to eliminate racism by eliminating the symbols that refer to it or express it. Unless some other work is done, all you are going to get is a bunch of racists who don’t use any of the banned words. Remember that when Amy Cooper called the Cops and said that an African-American male was threatening her, she didn’t use any banned words. But that wouldn’t have helped him much if the Cops had showed up and believed her story.