Slurs Sting

Slurs sting. They inflict communicative harms that other derogatory utterances do not. By presenting contempt as already shared rather than open to challenge, they degrade their targets and pre-empt resistance. Once uttered, a slur seems to ‘land’ before one can speak back, creating a distinctive un-blockability that silences both targets and sympathetic bystanders. We explain these effects using a Global Expressivist framework (Barker 2014), which theorises meaning as intersubjective, i.e., arising from the alignment of mental states across participants in conversation. Within this framework, we distinguish three kinds of speech acts: defensive expressive acts (assertions), non-defensive expressive acts (implicatives), and folk-expressive acts. We argue that slurs function as implicative acts. They do not put contempt forward for assessment or justification; instead, they introduce it as not up for dispute. Crucially, the distinctive harm of slurs lies not merely in the backgrounding of contempt, but in the coercive way accommodation is enforced. By presenting contempt as already shared, slurs make dissent socially and conversationally costly, pressuring hearers into tacit alignment. In this way, slurs silence both targets and bystanders by foreclosing the very forms of resistance that might otherwise counter their harm.