Growing up in my melting-pot family, using the word Negro was okay, and I don't think that it has devolved into an archaism quite yet, but the other "N" word that ended in an "r" was, and still is considered extremely taboo, and something that didn't come out of the mouths of anybody who was intelligent.
In my high school years, I got along pretty well with blacks (as a strongly bi-cultural asiatic/white boy, the white kids tended to patronize and pick on me), but I resented the fact they could use N****r as a term of endearment for each other but I wasn't allowed to use it myself (I mean, hey, I liked them - the black captains always picked me first for PE basketball - I always passed to someone who could shoot). Actually, I didn't resent it then like I do now, back then, it completely bewildered me. For that matter, my godfather would never let anyone in his family refer to themselves as "African-Americans", only as blacks or Americans. He noted that their Costa-Rican relatives were black, but certainly not American (or planning on sailing back to Africa).
Hurt my family like hell when most of his relatives cold-shouldered them at his funeral.
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Hurt my family like hell when most of his relatives cold-shouldered them at his funeral.