LET’S PLAY…..

Madame to you, Euddy.

Another interpretation: slang for Negro, a perfectly acceptable descriptor for years, used by government, census takers, law enforcement, and anywhere else where paperwork demanded a classification of ethnicity.

Somewhere along the way, the slang term, even though used routinely by those that make up the group, was deemed offensive and disrespectful when used by non-blacks, by whites in particular.
id est, playful, when used amongst themselves, yet
verboten when used by ‘outsiders’
FUBU
…a clothing line by blacks, meaning For Us, By Us.
Very apt, no? {Theirs, and theirs alone, to be allowed to use.}

And when the decision was made, to dial up the victim mentality, then what shortly followed was demands from influential, uppity ones that the word should be banned from the English language.
Ironic, when other languages have similar descriptors for the same labeling. Ask a working class Italian what tutsuni means.

So, too, the irony was further endured when Ebonics was pushed to get acceptance as a valid form of respectable language, with such ridiculous examples where pronunciations get butchered.
exempli gratia: “Axe” for “Ask”; “cent” for “cents”, and many others,
some of which actually made other ethnicities laugh when heard.

In the 70’s I enjoyed listening to Richard Pryor, on a .33 LP that I bought.
Comedic genius; funny as hell. Could change the pitch and tone of his voice to go into a totally believable, yet fictitious character, with facial expressions and mannerisms that launched a successful career in film and on stage.
He threw the slang word around liberally, to howls of laughter from the audience during live shows, by both blacks and whites.

It’s just a word.
If perceived as being an offensive insult, then a conscious decision was made to take extreme offense, instead of refusing to give the ‘offender’ the power to upset or intimidate the ‘victim’, and shake it off, for the offender’s ignorant, even if playful use of it, and move on.

When a black college student, ignorant of the correct meaning of word,
takes offense from a white professor for using the term ‘niggardly’, you get a prime example of the runaway train going off the rails on the Absurdity Express.
Worse, when explained that the word meant “stingy, cheap, or extremely frugal”, the hurt feeling self pity and fallacy of self righteousness of the student were seen as more important than the professor’s career, which was subsequently terminated and he was unjustly dismissed, for using a ‘racist’ sounding word.

Welcome to the hypocrisy of the woke, which goes hand in hand with despicable, vindictive acts of doxxing to destroy an offenders life, when no offense was intended, for the specific result of exacting revenge, an act of vigilante (in)justice, carried out in digital realms, using shame and slander instead of physical violence.

Racism is still a thing, because certain types of people make sure it stays, as a viable reason to sow hatred and division. It’s profitable, also.