I studied English and theater at the University of Missouri-Columbia, so I've taken special interest in the stories of political action coming out of my alma mater. As you've no doubt seen, in addition to the protests against the university's encroachment on health care for graduates, demonstrations by a group called ConcernedStudent1950, among others, have forced the resignations of the university's president, Tim Wolfe, and the chancellor, R. Bowen Loftin. If you haven't been keeping up, this timeline from The Maneater is a great place to start.

I paid particular attention to the stories of student body president Payton Head, the students and family of Charles Menifield, and the harassment of the Legion of Black Collegians.

Basically, some white students are hurling THE American racial epithet at black students in an effort to terrorize them. "People Yelling Racist Shit Out of Trucks" is the third most popular sport in Missouri, right behind football and beer pong, and as a young man going to school there I saw a lot of it. To hurl the n-word around without fear of reprimand is one of the powers the kids from the suburbs of St. Louis and the small towns surrounding KC exercise freely.

Thanks to the hard work of activists, students were inspired to grab some signs and set up some tents and shout over people who wish to silence them, to make them go away.

While all of this was going down, and thinking of the powers of sound and of people getting yelled out by dudes in trucks, I kept reaching for Roger Reeves' book of poems from Copper Canyon, King Me, which scooped up tons of prizes in 2013 and 2014. The book is as rich in sound as it is in subject. He uses lots of measured consonance with the occasional blast of alliteration, and thinks a lot about mental health, the legacy of racism in the United States, the history of poetry, the possibility of redemption in the natural world, romantic love, and geese.

But there's this one poem, "Cross Country", which seems to be about the moment so many black Mizzou students described, the moment some idiot yells a racist slur from his truck.* The title and the first line start us on a run: "When I ran, it rained niggers." The epithet weirdly and horrifically refreshes the cliche "it rained x," and also suggests that getting called the n-word while running is a common experience for the speaker.

But as he runs along, the speaker drops these soaring lines:

and the man yelling. Nigger in the cicadas tuning up
to tear the morning into tatters. Nigger in the squawk
and clatter of a hen complaining of a hand reaching
below her bottom and removing the warm work
of a cold night. Nigger in the reeds covering
the muck of a beaver’s hard birth. Nigger in the blue
hour of a field once wet with the breath of a lone horse
cracking along its flanks. Nigger in the fog lifting
from this field and the stillbirth it reveals. Nigger
in the running. In the bog at the end of this road.
In the war and in between the wars.

So, okay, there's a lot going on here. First, the natural imagery evokes scenes of theft, destruction, gross births and awful truths you can't conceal. In these lines, the racial epithet is charged with the anger with which it was thrown, and the freshly hit speaker now sees the racist ideology that the word signifies all over the place, in every instance of theft and destruction. But then he continues at full speed toward this strange conclusion:

Nigger
in the pink salt and eyelashes of a woman I love.
Her mouth pulling water from behind my knee.
Pulling, pulling, pulling. Think: nigger is the god
of our brief salvation. Nigger in a body falling toward a horizon.
Nigger in the twilight that is no longer a twilight
but a black creek fumbling along the spine of a boy
who is running through a city that is running out of water.
Even the lions have left for the mountains.
This is America speaking in translation, in glitter...

Here, Reeves seems to steal the hate from the n-word by pairing it with the imagery of pink salt and eyelashes, a brief salvation, a black creek. The word, by this point, has been repeated so much that it's become a noise, something that half-rhymes with "glitter." The "glitter"/"n-word" rhyme calls attention to the materiality of the epithet, suggesting that it could, even for a brief moment, become meaningless.

But the emotional reaction you feel when those two words rhyme also suggests that it's impossible to divorce the sinister meaning from the n-word. And the repetition also suggests constancy—the word will exist as long as America exists, even, as a Cher reference later in the poem points to, in some kind of afterlife.

*For another take on a similar instance of drive-by racism, check out Jaswinder Bolina's poem "First Course in General Linguistics."