system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
CMV society overreacts when a white person says the N word

The vast majority of "African Americans" today couldn't even name a relative that was alive back then, nor have any of them been affected directly by slavery. It seems like taking offense to that is the same as me taking offense to Jewish slurs. I'm not Jewish by any means and my family hasn't been for as many generations as I know. But there was a large population of Jews where we are from, and its possible I have some Hebrew in me. Does that give me the right to flip out and potentially have someone fired? 

If your going to bring up discrimination, that happens to literally everybody. Some people hate tall people. Some people hat fat people. Some hate men, some women. Rich, poor. It's really just another random thing. No matter where you go, there is a always chance people are going to treat you differently for some reason or another. Does that make it right to ruin someone's career/life for (even offhandedly) saying a word?
gpt
Slavery was a long time ago, but the civil rights act was 51 years ago. There are tens of millions of people alive today who were around during the time when much more blatant fuck-you-nigger racism existed, including a lot of black men and women.

Aside from that, the word has such an ugly history that it really has very little place in everyday discussion. As for whether people overreact, it depends on the circumstances. If you call someone that in anger, or use it casually, you're exposing yourself to not be a very thoughtful person, and certainly a socially tone deaf one. You might also be showing yourself to be exactly what people think: a racist.

Also the English language has so many other ways to insult or demean people, so why use such an ugly word that's more likely to not only get the speaker in trouble, but give whoever they called it the moral high ground.