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Right, so I think you're absolutely wrong in thinking that no people of standing in the community ever called for reclaiming the word with the goal of disarming racists. And even if this were true, it is undeniably a meme, and whether it stems from some authority or not does not matter. So, I believe my point stands, insofar as the purpose of using the word is to reclaim it from the racists, it has been a failure.
Second, if there was a goal, it would not have been to deny power to racists (though it may have been a 'fuck you' to racists, see below). Racists can still use the word with its same harmful effects, and if they couldn't, black people wouldn't be offended by white people using it (which afaik they still are - haven't tested that theory myself and don't plan to). More apt would be to describe the purpose of using the word when addressing a fellow black person as a way of identifying with an in-group. Like saying 'nigger' instead 'my brother', which used to be in common use among American blacks when I was a kid.
You're making a logical error here-- the fact that the initiative has failed cannot be proof the initiative does not exist. If the goal followed the linguistic development rather than the other way around, this still doesn't have any bearing on my post. The initiative exists and it has, so far, been a failure.
As to your claim that nigger, when used by black people, is a different word-- you are partially correct. So, while its use may have originally stemmed from an ironic use of the slur, nigger (more precisely "nigga"), when used as a synonym for "brotha," is no longer meaningfully tied to its origins. However, this unfortunately gives cover to black people who use both nigger and nigga as a derogatory slur towards other black people, e.g. "that stingy nigga", "he's a good for nothin nigger", etc. I think that most people who are accepting of blacks' use of the word as a term of endearment, including the black people who themselves use it, don't consciously recognize this distinction. This continued and sanctioned use of the slur within the black community is neither good for it, nor society as a whole.
In the end, I guess my advice to people who think this is unfair to whites is that they should try to see the history of the word and understand why some black people enjoy using it in an ironic sense. In the end, having one word that they can use but you can't is not really a huge travesty of justice or whatever. Just let it go.
I think this last paragraph, and in particular the bolded last sentence, belies the baselessness of your argument. It is a quagmire of a topic, it is deep in the weeds, but it is most certainly not insignificant. We can take this line of thinking to the absurd and make the same dismissive gestures on any topic until we realize that the most important topic, until we rand all the possible topics, is the ranking of topics. Trying to switch the subject when it's apparent no one is going to budge and even the dead horse is getting tired is admirable, but ushering the discussion to a new topic while simultaneously being dismissive is anything but.
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