The problem with this history, though, is that “blackness” itself has always symbolized negative things. Ask a kid what the color white symbolizes, and you’ll get a considerably large range of more or less positive meanings: good, beautiful, pure, etc. Ask the same kid what black symbolizes, and you get the opposite: bad, dirty, sinful, wrong, etc. In other words, the term “nigger” was never purely descriptive. Already attached to the ugly sinfulness that is blackness, nigger had racism built into its very semantic structure.