>It's not up to you. There is something resembling a consensus among black people and the very large number of people who agree with you about the problem of ra

>It's not up to you. There is something resembling a consensus among black people and the very large number of people who agree with you about the problem of racism in America that using the word --- even to sing along to a hip-hop song --- signals that you don't care about the word, and are willing to use it casually. I think "singing along" is not a sharp enough distinction - the Netflix guy, in a meeting about sensitive words, was presumably saying something like "The words that are awful and completely out of bounds and should never be used, like c-, f- or n-..." Such a use is firmly on the other side of a use-mention boundary in the way that singing along some lyrics is not. So it seems striking (at least to this non-American) that it should be considered heavily tabooed in this way. In a discussion on reddit, someone said "Within the last fifteen years, I've had readings in university English classes that contained said word and we're discussed and quoted in class with no one batting an eye. This was also the case in highschool before this. There's a big difference between referring to a Twain or Goines novel and using the word maliciously or with any intent beyond dispassionate quotations." So are they wrong, or was there a huge shift in the social norm of using the word in the last 15 years (discuss in class vs being ostracized and fired, both for mentioning the word with full awareness of its awful context) or is the consensus not really quite a consensus yet, and asserting that it is, like in the Netflix CEO's letter or your comment, are (well-meant) attempts at driving it further along? >Also, it's not like this is unique to black people and the N-word. LGBT people have similar words and we have reached similar detentes about them. That sounds strange to me. Are you sure? Presumably you mean the word f-, but I think I see or hear the word being discussed and quoted in the context and with the awareness of its awfulness quite often without heavy, or any, social consequences.