Stomping the N-Word

The Imus controversy also sparked conversations among African Americans over dinner tables, on lawn chairs and in church pews.

Young contemplated the matter while on a lunch break with Devin Tyler, 18, of Hyattsville, a business-hotel management major. Tyler, who is black, admits using the N-word with his black friends. He has also heard his parents say it but in a different way.

"My parents use it to talk about people who are doing wrong . . .," he said. "They use it about people who are acting negative."

Horace Avent, 39, a black security officer from Waldorf, said he uses the N-word "with the fellas when we are playing around." He doesn't feel he is being insensitive to his history. "It's a word, and I'm not offended by a word."

Marcia Harris, 38, is trying to combat that kind of thinking. Co-founder of the Web site Banthenword.com, the New York woman said she carries around a book with graphic pictures of lynchings and pulls it out whenever she hears an African American use the N-word.

"I show them those pictures of black men being lynched when you know the racists who did it were saying this word," she said. "This word came from hate. It was about hating us. It is not an endearment."

That sort of education, said Jahar Abraham, 39, of Southeast Washington, changed his mind.

Abraham, manager and promoter of the go-go band Familiar Faces, said he used the N-word until a mentor exposed him to its use in African American history.

"Some of these are kids who don't know their history. You know what MLK means to them? Money-loving killers, not Martin Luther King Jr. They took those initials and made them about how they feel," Abraham said. "That's what they do with that word."

In his book "The N Word: Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn't, and Why," The Washington Post's Jabari Asim traces the open use of the slur by African Americans to the late 1960s. He argues that the word, no matter who utters it, has "abetted our systematic dehumanization."

Mark Anthony Neal, a professor of black popular culture at Duke University, disagrees, saying African American artists use the word "to capture the complexity of black life." He said the real debate should be over "stopping the negative use of it."

"If you look at how black artists have used that word, historically, they have used it in creative ways, the same way black cooks have made chitterlings into a delicacy," Neal said.