this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2024
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Do you need me to explain the joke?
The common standard is that it is OK for black people to use this word, but not for anyone else to do so. For example, a black rapper may say it but a white fan singing along with the music may not repeat it. Such a distinction seems arbitrary to some people.
The humor here comes from treating this distinction as a law of nature as opposed to a subjective judgement. If indeed there was such a law of nature, it would be possible to conclusively determine whether or not Harris was black by having her say the word and scientifically measuring whether or not she was being offensive.
The idea that offensiveness has an objective existence outside of the human mind and the mental image of Harris undergoing such testing are ridiculous and therefore funny. The additional implications that the original distinction is also ridiculous and that Harris's race is not already conclusively determined make the joke transgressive and therefore more exciting.
Being white as a sheet of paper and only knowing like 5 black people in total, I might not be the best one to chime in. But at least the ones I know are very much not okay with other black people using the N word. That is in Germany, might be somewhat different somewhere else.
I think black people in Germany are usually relatively recent immigrants directly from Africa and so they don't have much culture in common with African Americans. Attitudes among African Americans vary, and a lot of that variation is related to social class. Pretty much no one wants to hear white people saying it but working-class African Americans living in segregated neighborhoods are much more likely to say it themselves than middle-class, more assimilated African Americans are. However, the attitudes of the (frequently white) people who might get you in trouble for being racist are much more uniform; the "common standard" is about what these people think.