I’ve been called a nigger, sand nigger, monkey, subhuman, and many other derogatory terms and I know how that hurts. It makes you deeply sad and sometimes vulnerable. But after some time, you learn to stop worrying and caring about it. It also made me look into history of the word and learn about it.

Look, there’s absolutely no problem in using the word nigger. Words in and on themselves don’t have any meaning. It’s the context that matters. I use the word nigger when I’m talking about it and it has no problem, because well it’s a word. But how it makes problem when people use it? I’m gonna explain.

So, for a long time, nigger meant “an ignorant person.” But words change and the meanings change with them. So when we talk about the word nigger, we’re not talking about someone being ignorant. As you know, nigger is a racial slur targeted at blacks and some other races.

Black is not a race but a skin color, not only in Africa but present even in South America, Northern Middle East, and South East Asia, but because of the history of slavery (and what happened to mostly black people), we’re gonna use the word black.

Nigger is taken from the word Negro. Now if you talk Spanish, you know Negro means black. Writing in 1904, journalist Clifton Johnson documented the “opprobrious” character of the word nigger, emphasizing that it was chosen in the South precisely because it was more offensive than “colored” or “negro”.

By the turn of the century, “colored” had become sufficiently mainstream that it was chosen as the racial self-identifier for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) In 2008, Carla Sims, its communications director, said “the term ‘colored’ is not derogatory, the NAACP chose the word ‘colored’ because it was the most positive description commonly used in 1909, when the association was founded.

Now why is it important? In its original English-language usage, nigger (then spelled niger) was a word for a dark-skinned individual. The earliest known published use of the term dates from 1574, in a work alluding to “the Nigers of Aethiop, bearing witnes”.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first derogatory usage of the term nigger was recorded two centuries later, in 1775. Since 1700s, it was used to subdue mostly African-descent people, to enslave them. Nigger was a word to bring the feeling and engrave the image of “being less” to black people.

Nigger was not an adoption of a word, but a derogatory phrase to bring the idea of someone being less. Nigger was (and still is) an offense.

Even now, the word’s meaning is not changed, however got adopted as a defense mechanism. If you check dictionaries or encyclopedias, you still get the meaning of being offensive and/or to belittle someone.

So what has changed? Why black people use it? Black people adopted the word since early 1940s as a defense mechanism. Why you can’t use it? It’s the context that counts. It’s the user, it’s the intention behind the use of the word that makes it good or bad.

It’s the racist assholes that are using it that makes us concerned about it. We don’t care when Chris Rock or Kevin Hart or Snoop Dogg say it, why? Because we know they are not racist. They can’t be discriminatory against themselves or their own race.

We don’t mind their context because we know they’re black. It doesn’t make us concerned because we should and are not worried about the words that speak the truth.

What makes us concerned? What should be worried about? The fact that there’s a racist and a bigot in every living room of every house in almost all countries.

So why then whites can’t use the word even if we know they are not racist? It’s because of the history, the pain and the harm it brings with itself.

Nigger, whether you use it as a racist or not, has a history full of shame, bigotry, racism, discrimination, oppression, and humiliation so every time we hear it, we feel those too.

Your right over freedom of speech in United States gives you the right to use the word even in a racist way, and nobody can take this away from you. It’s just a matter of respect, humanity, and equality that makes you, or others, to not use it. If you’re a racist bastard, you can use it, as well as a black person, but that brings the consequences of it.

For example, you will not be tolerated by many people, including those who control mainstream social networking sites, such as Twitter. If you want to start the argument of free speech, remember, the freedom of speech doesn’t mean you can force others to listen to you or even tolerate you.

So why not just let people block some racist person? Well because they have power over your account and they decided to force you not use the word so someone won’t accidentally see it and possibly feel all that pain.

If you are thinking about “it’s just words, words don’t hurt”, you should know that human beings have more than one side, they’re multidimensional. In addition of physical health, we also have mental health.

So words can hurt. If I curse at someone, that person may get sad or hurt, it might not affect you if I curse at you, but not all people are the same and not all people are carrying same history. And of course, not all people are facing a systematic and social discrimination every day.

So why black people call each other nigger again? Well as I said, it’s simply a defense mechanism. Take what hurts you and make it your own. I personally don’t like that either but a black person calling its own people/race nigger doesn’t have the same effect as a white person calling them that.

I’m not a nigger. A nigger is an ignorant person who is easily manipulated. Nigger is a derogatory term used for black people. I’m not ignorant and I’m not easily manipulated. Neither were our ancestors. They weren’t easily manipulated. They were beaten and tortured to make them believe less of themselves.

The people who oppressed them, who tortured them, who enslaved them were the niggers. They were niggers because they were ignorant to believe it’s OK to treat another human being like that.

So I’m not a nigger, and I’m not your nigger.