Maybe it’s a combo of all three; the fact that they weren’t well acquainted, plus his age plus his race.
I told my friends about this and were were all sort of disturbed and puzzled by this story, but we feel better about it now, knowing the context.
It can be OK to use them within the same group of friends or workmates who have known each other for a long time. Growing up in the Bronx and when I was working in Manhattan you could call your friend a guinea or a mick or a polack and it was just part of the banter. But that wouldn’t work for “nigger” in a group of whites.
My sister’s ex-husband is black, from Guyana. (We are Irish-German.) They have a college-age son and daughter who are biracial but of course in US culture are considered (and consider themselves) black. She says she was helping them to pack up to go back to school after spring break and they were playing hip-hop in which was full of “Nigger this” and “Nigger that.” She expressed some discomfort and they told her it was OK because they were black. She asked her daughter would be OK for her to use it and she said, “No, you’re white.”
No, it wouldn’t. I am Polish and couldn’t care less if someone referred to Polish folks as Polacks.
mmm
Because it’s not a word that should be used in the workplace. If there were no white people around, it would be okay, because nobody would report it, probably. You were there, so an apology was necessary.
Not that opinions on a message board are going to change the world at large all that much but I do find it refreshing to finally see a more nuanced discussion of language.
Yes, there is a distinction.
I don’t know the exact level of decorum, but I’ve worked in places where people might use foul language but still apologize, perhaps on second thought, if realizing they used it in front of somebody who would be made uncomfortable by it. It wouldn’t have to be fear that the person would ‘report’ it.
That seems a reasonable explanation here. It’s not a matter IMO of making some irrelevant hypothetical comparison to if the person saying it was white, OK that would probably be worse but not what happened. As used by black people the word can still generate discomfort to listeners. Others might not want to hear it, and shouldn’t be forced to. The young lady was just reacting with consideration on second thought seems to me, and it can be generalized that way as a opposed to any special code among black people about that particular word (or variations, whether those really differ is not the point of the story either IMO).
Even though some us (including me) use the word casually amongst ourselves, it’s still considered by most to be coarse language. So, yeah, she’s just apologizing for using coarse language around someone outside of that circle of coarseness. She’d probably apologize to her church-going Grandma too.
No, there’s a distinction. Northern Blacks who’ve never dropped an r in their lives still use “a” instead of “er”
It sounds like she apologized because she considers you an elder an you were at work. However, if it were me (and it wouldn’t have been, because I don’t casually use it), I’d avoid saying it around white people because I wouldn’t want them to think I was granting them an N-word Pass or opening the door to the “Why can you say it, but I can’t?” conversation.
I’ve told this story before, but here it is again:
My old high-school job, my first job ever, was in a West Texas restaurant. A popular place, the gimmick was people would phone in their orders from their table. Each table had a telephone, and just picking up the receiver alerted the counter that someone was phoning in. Quite a novelty back then.
We were a racially mixed crew, almost all high-school students, and almost all the black employees were football players. Large football players. There was a dorky little white guy named Brett – I swear this was not me – who sometimes worked the counter. He took the phone orders. When he took an order, he’d write it down on a ticket and then pass it to the cooks while saying, “Order in.”
One evening, the crew mix happened to be Brett at the counter and an all-black crew of cooks. As Blacks are sometimes wont to do when clowning around amongst themselves, they were calling each other “nigger.” Brett, who had not a prejudiced bone in his body – and even if he did, he certainly would not try to antagonize beefy football players, seeing as he made even Woody Allen seem macho – got into the spirit of things by passing the tickets and calling, “Order in, nigger.” The cooks were cool with it, because they’d been throwing the N word around like water, and Brett was considered pretty cool, so no one took offense. They knew he was just trying to join in.
But Brett was a little clueless and did not quite know when to stop. Long after the joke stopped being funny, he was still passing the tickets in and going, “Order in, nigger.” They started telling him, “Uh, look, Brett, that’s okay, you don’t have to do that anymore. Joke’s over. Haha, but joke’s over now.” Brett, who was as clueless as the day was long, and this was summertime, so the days were pretty long, still didn’t get it and kept it up. Finally, one of these large football players cornered Brett in the back and popped him a little. Not hard, just enough to so he’d know it really was time for the joke to end.