A descriptive term can be re-encoded as a racist slur by repeated association

Evidence

In 1965, Clark published his seminal text, Dark Ghetto. The term “ghetto” was known as an identifier of the ruthlessly segregated Jewish communities in Nazi Germany. Though social scientists like Clark hoped the term would broadcast the ruthless segregation and poverty that urban Blacks faced, the word quickly assumed a racist life of its own. “Dark” and “Ghetto” would become as interchangeable in the racist mind by the end of the century as “minority” and “Black,” and as interchangeable as “ghetto” and “inferior,” “minority” and “inferior,” “ghetto” and “low class,” and “ghetto” and “unrefined.” In these “dark ghettoes” lived “ghetto people” expressing “ghetto culture” who were “so ghetto”—meaning that the neighborhoods, the people, and the culture were inferior, low class, and unrefined. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 993

Categorization

• DEFINE: Shows how a neutral identifier (‘ghetto’) acquired racist, class-based connotations through repeated pairing with ‘dark’ and ‘inferior’—useful for the reader’s scheme of how racist language functions.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s existing article on sumptuary/immodesty moral panics: both show how a descriptor gets socially re-coded to signal class inferiority. — connects to: Repeated slogans sever language from lived experience, linking advertising with totalitarian control. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 121