Some words are meant to be derogatory. Some just become that way over time, due to changing perceptions.
I remember occasionally hearing elderly white people in the sixties using the word, 'nigra'. They didn't use it as a slur. It was simply what they called black people. I heard it maybe twice. Perhaps there were other white people at the time who used the term derogatorily. No matter the origins of the word, it definitely became a slur over time.
The word, 'negro', fell into the same category half a century ago.
I moved from Seattle to Kentucky seven years ago. I was at first shocked when I heard someone call black people “coloreds”. I realized that it’s pretty common around here.
I find it kinda comical because the new phrase is “people of color” and the old phrase is “colored people”. Anyone who claims there is a difference between those two phrases is like the characters in that old star trek TOS episode where the two races were fighting because one was black and white, with white on the left, and the other was black and white, with white on the right.
It’s the same thing, and I grow tired of using the label de-jure. I went from colored to black to african american, all in my lifetime. I am now just a cantankerous 65 year old. I just call them negroes. And I call my race “caucasian”. If they don’t like it, they can ignore me. I’m good.
BTW, what is kinda comical is that I rarely use any of those labels anyway. I rarely have the need to call out a person’s racial characteristics. It’s mostly only when discussing the words themselves that they come up.
But I confess it’s a lot of fun to go to a CNN Youtube video stuffed with liberal ad-hom comments and refer to Don Lemon as “the negro on the right (or left”. I learned it in trolling school. And I get some huge bites!