Originally Posted by
Magical_Hoohah
A black friend of mine, who doesn't personally use the n-word, but says he kind of gets it, explained to me what he has thought and heard about it.
He pointed out that there are VERY few things in life that a black American can have that a white person can't have more easily or can't steal. For example, at their inception, jazz, hip-hop, and rap were all exclusive to black culture, but white people came to appreciate those types of music, and eventually became successful musicians in those fields, not to mention producers and so forth. Whenever something good blooms out of black culture, white people eventually find ways to appropriate it and use it to their own benefit. Meanwhile, it's not like black people can use any aspect of white privilege to their own advantage. Thus, it can seem desirable to have even one thing that white people are forbidden to use or appropriate, and as a bonus, can be used by black people to make most white people profoundly uncomfortable.
Beyond that, if white people can't use the word at all, we have no power to determine how it evolves or gets redefined. So in that way, black culture can take a word that was once used for oppression, and can have exclusive power to reshape and mold that word into anything they want it to be. At the end of the day, only one group of people should have a say in whether the n-word lives, dies, or becomes something new.