I've been an American my whole life, and this is the first I've heard of that word being considered racist. But I've heard a whole lot of revisionist history around words lately.

Welcome to the funhouse of undulating mirrors, where words become meaningless, they can mean whatever you want (or don't want) them to mean.

This is also where we imbue magical powers to some words, as we try to ban them... which only makes them more powerful and volatile, and they might even suddenly manifest themselves implied in places and other words where they've never been implied before!

I don't think it's racist. I think it's more that the person saying that Obama reneged thinks that makes Obama a "renegger" when it actually makes him a renegade.

It is when you specifically say it in reference to a black person while overemphasizing the part of the word that phonetically sounds like the first syllable of the n word. The word itself is not racist, the usage of the word to call out a person's race as a negative attribute certainly is.

https://ghostarchive.org/archive/dLP18