Black people everywhere take note and manage themselves in a largely white-dominated society, learning and sharing the peculiar rules of a white-dominated society in which expressions of white racism are becoming increasingly explicit.
Why do black people living among the whites get offended easily? Every word uttered around them tend to get them triggered.
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Almost every black person living among whites has experienced the sting of disrespect on the basis of being black. A large but undetermined number of black people feel acutely disrespected in their everyday lives, discrimination they see as both subtle and explicit. Black folks know everyday racism – that becomes powerfully underscored by highly publicized racial incidents like the incident at Starbucks, the recent spate of police killings of black men, or the calling of police on a black female student while napping in a common area of a Yale dormitory.
In the face of these realities, black people everywhere take note and manage themselves in a largely white-dominated society, learning and sharing the peculiar rules of a white-dominated society in which expressions of white racism are becoming increasingly explicit.
While American society purports to be open and egalitarian, or “equal opportunity”, such everyday outcomes leave black people deeply doubtful. Moreover, black people are generally convinced that they must work twice as hard to get half as far in life.
Long before the election of Donald Trump, black people believed the average white person was against them and their kind
Among their own, black people affirm and reaffirm these central lessons and, out of a sense of duty, try to pass them along to others they care about, and especially to their children.
For black people, experience holds a dear school, and the knowledge they acquire is based largely on the experience of living while black in a society that is dominated by white people.
Therefore, this cultural knowledge is most often inaccessible to white people, and when confronted with it, most white people are incredulous.
There is an undeniable double standard in the use of the n-word. Some Black people freely use it in intimate conversations with one another. Black hip-hop artists use it in their lyrics.
So why then, is it okay for Black people to use it and not Whites? Why do black people get so triggered when they hear a white person use the n-word on them? There’s no one answer to that question. Some Black people say the word is too repulsive to use in any context, even by other Black folks. They claim that using it reflects “internalized oppression”: Black people unwittingly accepting racist stereotypes.
But other Black people say they can use the n-word because they have “reclaimed” it and taken the sting out of a slur by using the word as a term of endearment.
If that doesn’t make sense, consider this comparison. Some women who call each other “bitch” make a similar claim: We use it as a term of affection.
Some Black people who use the n-word follow the same logic. Since we have uniquely suffered from the use of the n-word, we’re the only ones who have the right to use it. When we reclaim it, we can use it any way we want. For them, using the n-word isn’t repeating a racial slur; it’s an act of defiance.