The first thing that struck me as I read that article is that Gen. Silveria was castigating people for harboring the same sort of hatred that, according to his Commander In Chief, "some good people" exhibited in Charlottesville, and I immediately said a silent prayer for his career path.
When I listened to Lt. General Silveria I thought: "Gee, with a few edits, that's the speech Trump should have delivered after Charlottesville." If Trump had spoken out in that manner, instead of making racists feel more empowered, the USAFA event may not have happened.
The "N" word is an interesting phenomenon here in NYC...perhaps elsewhere too, in that it has pretty much fallen into the vernacular such that I can safely say that if I'm within earshot of two black men who aren't wearing suits & ties I'll hear it within a couple of minutes.
And it's not just black men who use the word; male Middle Easterners and Hispanics use it too, although, happily, not disparagingly, but not (politically correct) whites. (I don't recall hearing it much, if at all, from women.)
And further, I know upscale blacks who use the word disparagingly in private conversation.
It makes for an awfully sticky situation.
I agree. The word even shows up in popular entertainment such as movies and, although usually spoken by black actors. It seems that the acceptability of such speech is dependent on who is speaking, but it still makes me very uncomfortable.
An explanation was given by the Rapper Ice Cube when taking Bill Maher to task for using the word. He said, in part:
"I still think you need to get to the root of the psyche because I think there's a lot of guys out there who cross the line because they're a little too familiar, or they think they're too familiar. Or, guys that, you know, might have a black girlfriend or two that made them Kool-Aid every now and then, and then they think they can cross the line. And they can't.
You know, it's a word that has been used against us. It's like a knife, man. You can use it as a weapon or you can use it as a tool. It's when you use it as a weapon against us, by white people, and we're not going to let that happened again . . . because it's not cool . . . That's our word, and you can't have it back.
. . . It's not cool because when I hear my homie say it, it don't feel like venom. When I hear a white person say it, it feel like that knife stabbing you even if they don't mean to."That is no different than a group of older women calling themselves "girls" when those same women would be offended and insulted if they were called "girls" by a male. They can call each other "girls" but if you are a male you better %&$@ well call them "women" or in formal situations, "ladies".
Yup, and it sounds like the same kind of "word ownership" described above. You can believe that, as a man with two grown daughters, I know better than to make that mistake.