Quote:
Originally Posted by Xerxys
I honestly don't get what your saying here. It's alright for a black person to say something like ... "that motherfucking nigger better watch his tongue" than it is for a white person? What, history makes it alright? Since when do two wrongs make a right, or two same kinds of infractions are wrong on different levels? The sentence very clearly expresses distaste in the person who is employing the use of the word. Are you saying that a white person saying the exact same thing with the exact same inflection carries heavier meaning?
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First of all, notice that the n word, by itself, is not the insult there. That in the first place makes it different, and makes it explicit that the usage is completely different.
The second difference is that a black person appropriating that term to refer to another one, and using it in that entirely different context, has a different meaning than a white person using the n word as the insult itself, a word that is only offensive because of its history of being used by whites to deny the basic humanity of blacks. In one instance it is a throwaway insult as appropriated by those who it is normally used against, in the other it is an insult that has been systematically used for centuries to dehumanize an entire group of people.