4 Things You Should Teach Your Kids About Racism Right Now

[Orrex]

74. I have a partial answer to your interesting question

Disclaimer: I'm your basic, boring white mutt claiming no authority to speak on this subject on behalf on anyone except myself.

There is one thing that I question though. For a young white person who has AA friends and spends the day singing along with artists who use the N-word constantly, that person's connection to the word is quite different.

That's true, but it goes back to what I mentioned about "certain contexts." If those same young white people dropped into a crowd of AA strangers, I suspect that their use of "the N-word" would elicit a very different response than when they use it among their friends. Among their friends it's ok for them to use the word, because the usage is informed by the context of familiarity and shared experience

I am not questioning the "punching down" premise....I just think that this is a strange experiment being conducted on young white brains.

That's true as well. I don't think it's too much to ask of a brain (white or otherwise) that it remain mindful of context and circumstance. If anything, that would seem a necessary component of mental development. This is an admittedly prickly but altogether manageable aspect of modern interaction.

I've never personally been in a situation where I would have felt comfortable using "the N-word" word, except maybe in "academic" discussions of it, and certainly never as a means of addressing a person. But I accept that my experience is not everyone's, and it's very likely that others have had greatly different experiences.