Does anyone have links to some good papers on use/mention, regarding racial slurs?

I see a lot of people simplistically relying on use/mention as a rationalization. But this can be valid only if you don’t have a clear understanding of how racial slurs operate.

Terms like “use/mention” quickly become magic buzzwords that erase objections.

(Note the Wikipedia entry two people link to is a good intro, but has zero insight on use/mention with racial slurs.)

This paper (one of the best I’ve read on racial slurs and use/mention) specifically states that because slurs are performative, mention doesn’t remove the offense.

https://ruccs.rutgers.edu/images/personal-ernest-lepore/whatdidyoucallme.pdf

This paper also is really good for understanding what racial slurs do, and why it’s difficult to remove the offensiveness in racial pejoratives—even in quotations and mentions.

https://iep.utm.edu/pejorati/ 

Interestingly, we almost all know this to be true intuitively. Pew’s 2019 survey shows that 83% of Americans (of all races, including whites) believe that the N-word is always or mostly offensive

The moral panic is not that society finds racial slurs unacceptable (even when used as mentions).

The moral panic is there is a tiny minority of Americans who view modern multicultural society as an existential threat.

I also find it interesting that many people are saying that words aren’t magic. But in this universe, words are the closest thing we have to magic.

In fact, our concept of magic is closely tied into what words do (create things/reality).