When it comes to repurposing racial slurs like the n-word, white people need to understand that they’re not entitled to everything, author Ta-Nehisi Coates has said.

Mr Coates, a leading intellectual and commentator on African-American issues, was asked during a panel about white hip-hop fans who want to rap along when they they hear black rappers use the word n****r that functions both as a hateful epithet and a source of black solidarity.

In response, Mr Coates offered a point he has long made about language: context and relationships matter. He noted that he would not use an anti-LGBT slur that some gay people use amongst themselves, and that he does not join in when his wife and her female friends use the word “b***h”.

While Mr Coates and his wife call each other “honey”, he noted, “if we were walking down the street together and a strange woman referred to me as ‘honey’ that wouldn’t be acceptable”.

But “when you’re white in this country you’re taught that everything belongs to you. You think you have a right to everything”, Mr Coates argued, which offers a false sense of entitlement to certain words that have special resonance for groups that have experienced those words as an attack.

Discarding that outlook and realizing that the n-word is unacceptable, Mr Coates said, could help white people empathize with African-Americans’ history of dispossession.

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