It was insanely prevalent, especially in athletics.

I don’t know all of the whys behind that (although I have my theories: the western US and Polynesia are not areas where black slavery was a part of the lived cultural experience; race relations had healed to a point where young generations didn’t have the context of older people who had lived through segregation and integration).

But what I do know is that if you were a young male—ESPECIALLY if you played football or basketball or were a non-black racial minority—you were likely to use that word and homosexual slurs and the r-word.

It was then nerds in the back of the class and the school marm teachers that viewed those as morally bad. Everyone else seemed to treat it like a bad word, but nowhere near the worst word.