with the discussion. The OP seems legit in their desire to understand things

I have never been comfortable with the word in any context. I can understand the idea of members of a minority group that is the target of discrimination using the word to "own" the word - such as happened with gays embracing the word "queer," and people in Japan of mixed Japanese and non-Japanese ancestry embracing the word "hafu", but it still make me uncomfortable, and I will never use the words myself.

Btw, my first encounter with the n-word was as a 10-year-old child walking to elementary school in rural Virginia in 1961. My mother had started tutoring two recently enrolled African American students in our school, and two old codgers on a front porch used to yell-out "your mama is a n___r -lover" as we walked by. The two were so obviously from another era that we just laughed at them. I'd play with the boy after school while my mother tutored his older sister.