Excuse my ignorance but I don't understand why anyone would want to use the word - I'm European caucasian from Vancouver Canada, and have never used that word personally and never heard it conversationally growing up, so I don't have context outside of US media, reading literature, and my time in the US (and only started traveling or living there in later in my 20s).
Can someone explain it to me and hopefully I don't get banned asking it? But why do black people in the US still use that word if they as a society don't want it? Doesn't it seem to be to be continuing to imbue it into the lexicon of your society when you want it removed from it? Especially for those ignorant to the historical significance. I understand systematic racism towards black people is still very strong in the US (and possibly even getting worse), but unless you are a victim of the systematic racism, then you aren't experiencing it first hand, it seems it may be hard for a lot of newer sheltered generations to learn the historical significance. So they don't get the historical significance but experience it from pop culture often - so it seems to create these kinds of situations.
I just don't understand the logic. Does it have something to do with trying to own a word and create your own cultural power on it to override the awful history of it? I just read the history on it and it never had a positive connotation and repurposed for a negative / derogatory connotation like some words to want to bring it back to the positive connotation. Because the logic of wanting to repurpose it and owning it makes sense but it seems to me to be less of a pro then the con of continuing to imbue it into the lexicon of US society to me. Is this where the difference is in thoughts because nobody using the word at all and only culture that experienced it using it?
I just don't think I see it in any other situation in the other cultures or subcultures I've experienced or lived in. I just always go by the philosophy of only using the words someone wants to be described with - and if you're not sure you ask - so you don't have these situations like you see with this girl. While that would seem obvious, I do see this not being applied by a lot of people still, especially with the newer dynamic of pronouns.
And that's probably the best example I can understand and why this doesn't make sense to me. Unless I know I always ask someone what pronoun they prefer to use the correct pronoun for their gender identification (as an example), and then I never see them use the pronoun they don't prefer but don't tell me to use the pronoun they just used - that would seem counter-productive to me.
Thoughts? Again hopefully not banned for trying to understand. Mods please understand the ignorance when you don't have US context.
