Greentext

i don’t disagree but i think it’s more complicated than that. (explicitly don’t take this as a justification for saying slurs, i don’t condone being a shithead)

for better or worse the word has been reclaimed and not every use of the n-word has racist motivations. it’s not even always racially motivated at all anymore, and it’s been that way for decades now at least here in the US. in fact, i’d being willing to bet money that this usage of the word has likely far outpaced its use as a slur in most of America by now. both are still in use but there are clearly two entirely different sets of semantic meaning floating around. you’ll see poor white people saying it a lot now but they’re still using it in a semantic sense to just mean bro or homie, it’s not being used the way their ancestors were saying it. and back when i ran in those circles more everyone said it and nobody batted an eye, regardless of race. the word is more of an in-group vs out-group identifier in modern vernacular. you can argue about how racist the n-word is and how its history makes using it at all problematic all you want but realistically 99% of the people saying it would laugh you out of the building when confronted with those ideas and don’t give a shit. honestly a lot of discourse surrounding the n-word on the internet is made fun of by black americans. it’s tone deaf and ignorant of the black experience, most this discourse online. at worst it’s a literal white savior complex.

because 4chan strips all context and identity from threads we, as an audience, can’t really know whether or not this is what we would colloquially call racist. and if you argue that this is racist regardless of the context, that’s fair, that’s my reflexive take too - but you have to realize if you make that argument you’re implicitly arguing black reclamation of words like that is invalid under conditions of anonymity. and that’s… a whole can of worms that im probably the wrong person to open up.

is that all fucked up? yeah! but it certainly says more about culture and society than it does 4chan individually, imo. i think people like easy little boxes more than messy reality, generally speaking.