As a southerner it irks me too, on several levels. For one thing, I guarantee you that while using the word might fly in a small mom’n’pop convenience store or family owned restaurant, if you say that word in a public school or a Starbucks or a bank or a call center you’d be fired just as quickly here as at any place in the nation, possibly quicker since there are a lot more black customers to be offended in most of the south. For another, it implies we have a monopoly on racism, which we don’t and never have. For third, it implies that the word is so much a part of our culture we can’t get past it, which is bullshit.
I’ll admit that when I was a kid I was much more racist than I am now, as probably were most black kids my age, and I used the N word frequently as a teenager (never as interchangeable with ‘black’ but when applied to ‘trashy’ black people- the ones who if they were white would be considered whitetrash) and I said it for about the same reason teenaged boys say “fuck” and “pussy” a lot and sneak cigarettes- it made us feel we were growing up. I also said ‘faggot’ and told Pollock jokes. However, while I own that I once did this, I don’t do it anymore and understand that and why it was wrong to do it then, and I completely understand and accept that even when applied to someone who is every negative racial stereotype imaginable it is just as racist a term as if applied to Barack Obama.
My problem with Deen isn’t that she used the word 30 years ago but the fact she doesn’t seem to have grown at all in that 30 years. She can blame it on her culture, but that’s bullshit: I lived in Albany, GA where she got her start- it’s a rural Dagobah like flat town in southwest GA with lots of “good country folks” and not so good types, both black and white, and while I didn’t like the place I can assure you that you didn’t hear racial slurs everywhere you went, nor was I called faggot (at least to my face) when I mentioned I was gay. (Mentioned for bizarreness quotient: it’s the only place I’ve ever seen where the gay bar shares a parking lot with an all-you-can-eat catfish-nugget buffet.)
Paula Deen does not represent all southerners or all Georgians or all Savannians or all Albany-ans or all fat women with diabetes or all big haired morons with more dollars than sense, she represents Paula Deen.
As for the “having older relatives who don’t mean any offense by the term”, I call bullshit. The term “nigger” has been understood, even by rural whites, to be intentionally offensive at least as long as I’ve been alive, and I grew up in the sticks of Alabama. My oldest relatives did (and my 88 year old aunt still does) use the word colored and even nigra without meaning any offense; I totally understand that if* I* were to call Michelle Obama “a beautiful colored woman” or refer to Alice Walker as “my favorite nigra author” they wouldn’t be much less offended than if I used “the n word” and for my generation it wouldnt’ be, BUT I really don’t believe the generations that can remember WW2 and before mean/t anything racist by it any more than I do when I say “black”, a term some consider offensive, or when I say “mentally retarded” which I honestly did not realize until recently is considered offensive now when referring to ‘developmentally disabled’ (or whatever the current preferred term is) individual.
“Nigger”, though, has always been offensive and even considered a trashy word. For at least as long as I’ve been alive it’s been accepted that you don’t use the word around black people because it’s very bad manners/offensive/racist and, perhaps most importantly, low class. The same people would say ‘nigger’ to mean black who would say ‘titty’ to mean breast- it’s a word EVERYBODY knows not to use in polite society and has known for generations and that’s not meant to be interchangeable with ‘black’.