@stilgar I hang around people who are just barely on the right side of criminal, more or less friends I have had my whole life. now I grew up in the 90's and 2000's with one of the most popular games being gta san andreas. I knew people who said nigga, I heard the word, but it wasn't till gtasa dropping it 5 times a sentence that it went from something you look over your shoulders and see if someone may complain to the point its just common vernacular.
euphemisms are fairly insidious, you can look at said words root to see it was latin for black, yet somehow saying black isn't offensive, though there was a point they tried to make black offensive. The more you can control the language the more you control thought because if you can effectively erase a word you now erased a way to express an idea.
If you want an opinion, black people should be proud of what they did, they effectively took a word back and inserted it into the vernacular in such a way that its common. the word has next to if not no power, and became a word that is similar if not identical to dude. The only mis step was instead of asserting the word as proof of a dominant culture, the majority decided its either just as offensive, or that it needed to be a non secret handshake.