Brown Indian man here.
I was in 4th or 5th grade playing basketball at some field trip summer camp thing my entire class went on.
We picked up a game with some black kids our age from some other school. My middle name starts with N and my friends were obviously saying my name ( I go by my middle name) during the game. I used to be pretty good at basketball, so the black kids during game starting calling me "nigga n******". I grew up in white suburbia and we looked at each other not knowing how to react, but it was fine. We had a good time and the kids were nice. Nothing mean, nothing bad about it all.
So after that, it became something that lasted all the way to now. 25 years later. The handful of times a year that I see my childhood friends, someone might bring call me nigga N.
No one says it over and over. It's not a part of our vocabulary. No one says nigga at all outside of this one very specific context.
The point is context. I work and live in Manhattan now and I hear it all the time on the subway. Not too often by people who aren't black, but usually it's other minorities. I can't remember the last time I heard a white guy saying it in person. Doesn't really happen in New York. Although there are some wannabe thug Indians that I personally know that say it all the time. Shit makes no sense.
People are becoming more aware now, but what do you expect when it's a word with so much behind it in terms of how black people have been treated in America, yet at the same time it's a word that is said over and over and over in popular music. You grow up listening to rap from the late 80s and early 90s like I did and it's a word you heard constantly. It's the same now and some people are going to pick up on that because of course people repeat what they hear in the media they consume.
A lot of it is also about where people come from. Don't expect people from a poor socioeconomic background to raise themselves up to whatever moral high ground you are looking down from. For the most part, people are a product of their environment. You can't point your fingers and say "oh this person shouldn't be saying this word" when you can't understand why they are saying it to begin with. Spend a regular amount of time in Harlem at 125th even just at the subway station that transfers the 4,5, and 6 and you will hear it pretty much constantly and while usually it's black people, a lot of times it's Hispanic people as well because all their peers are speaking and using the same vocabulary.
Everyone here wants to make everything so fucking black and white. It's not. It almost never is.
