Never used it. My mother despised racism and taught me early in life that such language can be harmful. I heard that word a lot, usually from relatives and other adults and I was appalled every time. I encountered so much racism as a kid that it’s hard for me to believe racism isn’t rampant everywhere. It was a part of my culture that still haunts me. I recently learned that my best friend in junior high received racist death threats when we were in high school (in freaking 1999!) That place was such a cesspool.
IIRC, she had used also it recently, to describe an event she wanted to stage, didn’t she? So it wasn’t just like “back in the 80s”. It was a hell of a lot more than that.
I have a very dear friend from high school-- one of maybe three friends from high school I still see regularly. When we see each other, one of says, “I fucking love you,” and the other responds “I fucking love you too, Bitch.” Neither of us remembers why, but at this point, if she just said “I love you,” I’d worry something was wrong.
As for the O.P. Never. Ever. Not once. Not in any context. I was raised to understand that this word was anathema to those around me, and represented a hate and violence that my family held no truck with.
The rapper Ja Rule called me the N-Word once. But that’s a tale for another thread…
Childhood in 1960’s Georgia, so of course I was exposed to the word. I don’t use it to peoples’ faces but I think it frequently. Especially when confronted with stereotypically " 'Hood " behavior and social norms.
When I was a kid, I remember one of my older cousins - he was a teenager and I was probably still in single digits - holding forth that not all black people were n—s and some white peoples were n—s, so it was not a racial slur, but about the way people acted.
I suspected he was full of crap at the time, but never called him on it. I’ll bet even today there are lots of people who think like that.
White, Southwest Side Chicago. Growing up in the 80s, it was a word I heard often enough and occasionally used, in the “catch a nigger by his toe” rhyme, and we also called the “kill the man with the ball” game alternatively as “kill the nigger with the ball.”
Yep, I never used the n-word as a part of a childhood rhyme, taunt, or other assorted jape, and didn’t even know of them as a matter of fact, but we definitely played StQ.