The "N" Word

This morning's Times reported some college administrator's admonition to a white student that it was not okay to sing along with the lyrics to some some song on the radio where the singer uses the "n" word.  It becomes a racial slur when she does so even if the song she hears, the singer, everything in the production of the "n" word, is from black persons, arriving invisibly over the airwaves.  It just seems to me that this goes too far.  Nigger as a derogatory term employed by bigoted whites has a long history.  It is a great example of the theory of the Marked and the Unmarked where the Unmarked represents the majority group who control the culture, in our own country, this being or used to be white Anglo Saxon Protestant persons,  and the Marked were persons outside of that marking, for instance, African-Americans, Jews, Irish Catholics, etc etc whose identity was imposed upon them by the Unmarked group.  That in fact extends to male and female where the male gender dominates and determines the definition of woman.  Black persons have taken back "nigger" and made it their own word, although from my own experience it is not a word that one hears passing the lips of middle and upper middle class African Americans.  But they have taken the word back ferociously and are so insistent upon controlling its meaning and use that they have made white afraid to say the word, while at the same time provocatively using it themselves.  I dare you to define me, is what is being said by this prohibition.  As a gay person I have dealt all my life with straight persons, straight males, particularly, wanting to determine my personality, my sexual habits, my ethos, so I can well understand why some gays like to identify as "fairies" and other more derogatory terms so as to control them, and impose their own meaning and context on them.  Life gets really complicated for the young when they cannot sing along with something they hear on the radio.  I always told my daughters when they were teenagers that they should seek out cute black boys and date them so that they could become comfortable around another body, another thought process, another projected identity, as girls of the great Unmarked, surrender to a relationship with a Marked person and surrender your impulse to create identity.