This will sound like I’m being needlessly perverse, but: no.
Intent is what matters. Quite clearly, the word you mention can be used in a variety of ways for a variety of reasons — not all of them racist.
Conversely, you can be the most awful racist without ever saying an offensive word. And there are plenty of those sorts of people too.
However, as for the specific example you mention: I know Americans tend to feel very strongly about that word and I understand that. But to most other English speakers, whilst it’s a horrible word, its mere usage isn’t itself always considered a terrible crime. In fact, it commonly occurs in literature studied in schools — and yes, the teachers and students will in that case have licence to use (or read aloud, if you like) the word.
I don't know if "perverse" is the word... maybe "avoidant". I can try to be more specific. Is it racist for a white person to use the n-word to refer to black people in casual conversation? As in, "I was walking to the shop and passed some n***s playing football."
If your question is whether mere use of language implies racism, I think I’ve answered that above.
If I heard the sentence you give, I would quickly assume the speaker might be racist. But it’s clearly not an assumption that is always valid, because I can equally imagine someone using the word (ill-advisedly, of course) as a joke.
It’s like saying ‘a person walking around with a knife in public must be a violent criminal’. Yes — the likelihood is that they are.
If you think the sentence you gave is racist (a priori), you should consider whatever definition of racism you want to use and work out how it applies to that case.
I get that what I’m saying is an unpopular view, but personally I think we shouldn’t give mere words such power. Their use in a situation that has separate indicators of prejudice is what we should really hope to avoid — going for the word itself is just naive.
> personally I think we shouldn’t give mere words such power
I sort of get where you're coming from. You don't want to live in a world where speech can be sanctioned and censored for its own sake,. But I wonder if taking this view to its logical conclusion risks neglecting the fact that words do have power in our society. The "n-word" is offensive because its historical usage was intimately tied to the oppression of black people. As a consequence, black people today feel unsafe and hated if someone from those oppressors' background uses it (perhaps outside of extremely sensitive circumstances).
The question then is whether it's right sanction speech based on it making those people feel unsafe and hated. And in the UK we do; we have hate speech laws. By contrast, the US is relatively laissez-faire in what it allows legally, but - perhaps as a consequence - there are very strong, polarising cultural norms on speech.
Going back to Boris Johnson's speech. In an article criticising Tony Blair's focus on foreign policy, he writes:
> What a relief it must be for Blair to get out of England. It is said that the Queen has come to love the Commonwealth, partly because it supplies her with regular cheering crowds of flag-waving piccaninnies; and one can imagine that Blair, twice victor abroad but enmired at home, is similarly seduced by foreign politeness.
> They say he is shortly off to the Congo. No doubt the AK47s will fall silent, and the pangas will stop their hacking of human flesh, and the tribal warriors will all break out in watermelon smiles to see the big white chief touch down in his big white British taxpayer-funded bird. Like Zeus, back there in the Iliad, he has turned his shining eyes away, far over the lands of the Hippemolgoi, the drinkers of mares' milk. He has forgotten domestic affairs, and here, as it happens, in this modest little country that elected him, hell has broken loose.
The only defense Johnson provided here is that the quotes were "satirical" and "taken out of context". Reading them in context, I'm still perplexed as to why he employed derogatory slurs and invoke racist stereotypes. Perhaps he was saying that both the Queen and Tony Blair have a racist, paternalistic view of the commonwealth? I have definite doubts about this, as it's very unlike BoJo to take potshots at the Queen, and he himself apparently has a fondness for the colonial era (e.g. quoting a pro-imperialist Rudyard Kipling poem in a temple in Myanmar). Even if we grant him the satire defense, simply replacing "picaninnies" with "children" achieves the same effect without invoking crude stereotypes.
Intent is what matters. Quite clearly, the word you mention can be used in a variety of ways for a variety of reasons — not all of them racist.
Conversely, you can be the most awful racist without ever saying an offensive word. And there are plenty of those sorts of people too.
However, as for the specific example you mention: I know Americans tend to feel very strongly about that word and I understand that. But to most other English speakers, whilst it’s a horrible word, its mere usage isn’t itself always considered a terrible crime. In fact, it commonly occurs in literature studied in schools — and yes, the teachers and students will in that case have licence to use (or read aloud, if you like) the word.