When Whites use it, it is different. We may not like facing that, but it is.
I know what you mean.
I’m about the same age as Paula Deen, and she was born and raised in Georgia, and I was raised in Mississippi, so we probably had about the same experiences growing up.
When we were small children, in the 50’s and 60’s, just learning to talk, we obviously would learn words and their usage through listening to our parents and other adults, just like anybody else on the planet.
We would learn that this thing we lived in was called a ‘house’, we rode in ‘cars’, there was a ‘tree’ in the front yard, the man mowing the yard was a ‘n-word’. We had no other word for them in common usage. It was not especially ‘racist’, it was like calling a bear a bear and a duck or a duck. As small children we knew no other word with which to refer to black people. It was used in common conversation, even between blacks and whites, to refer to a person that was black, no insult intended or meant.
It was not until the end of Civil Rights Era that the n-word became un-civil in public use.......