No— No forgiveness necessary and glad you brought it. I had learned and used the word from your article. It is not surprising that is may have been erased from the dictionary and from history books. How does it make whites look? Like brutal, dehumanizing enslavers, a type of people opposed to democracy. And that is what they were. I just heard minutes ago on watching a history of segregation of schools in Delaware a white historian from the state say that Delaware was “just fooling the Supreme Court decision” of 1896. That is false and not just distortion, but a complete omission of intent. States in the North made laws after that decision forbidding segregation of schools.

Schools in the South, 15 states that included Delaware, made conscious choices in their legislative bodies to make laws that forbid integrated schools. This was not merely “following the law,” as the Supreme Court does not make laws, it is the most moral and deliberate choice a state can make: passing a law and then giving it to the governor to sign. In the case of the North, they made decisively moral choice that was pro-democracy to state against segregation, making it illegal for schools to purposefully do this. Delaware made a moral choice—immoral from the side of those in favor of democracy but good morals for those in favor of autocratic supremacy—to make desegregating schools against the law.

That is not the “well, they just had to follow the Supreme Court decision” kind of choice of going along to get along. That was a immoral and powerful decision by the state. Like coffle, it is a decision to eliminate at almost all times the immoral and anti-democracy choices against inalienable rights that plague those 15 states in particular very strongly (though no state escapes racist choices entirely). I’m not so shocked the word has been phased out, as the worst words that imply the greatest immorality of white rulers like DeSantis often are. (It’s not a war in the Ukraine, but a special operation.)

Keep charging ahead.