Slurs are linguistic expressions capable of wronging the targeted individuals by causing harm, imposing power imbalances, or maintaining oppressive social structures. To amend the damages caused, the speaker must offer some sort of atonement. But how should one right the linguistic wrong caused by using a slur? The aim of this paper is to provide an answer to this question. We argue that while current accounts can help us capture the derogatory and psychological harms of slurs within the confines of conversational dynamics, further efforts are required to capture the structural dimension of slurs as a tool of oppression within society. To this end, we resort to the field of structural linguistic justice to develop an account of the reparation that slurring individuals owe to the targets to fully right the structural linguistic wrong they have made.
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Song et al. (2026) studied this question.
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