The title.

mariposa-9: "No, it's just as simple as this: people weren't as hypersensitive to that word as they are now. We've regressed."
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No, it's about the same as it is now. Black people back then used it, not white people.

In this instance, a predominantly black-made movie.

John Amos said it on Good Times, Nell Carter on Gimme A Break, Sherman Hemsley and Moses Gunn on The Jeffersons.

Don't recall if it was ever on MASH (don't think so. They couldn't think of a black person as a human on there, with Spearchunker).

Uhura on Star Trek was referred to as a 'negress' (by Abraham Lincoln, no less), but she responded to it, actually to his idea that it may offend her.

Now as for shows like Room 222 or anything else back then, I wouldn't know. They probably thought they were tackling a thorny subject and did, but I shudder to think of how they handled it.

Archie Bunker always said 'colerd'.

It's always been 'okay' for the black person to say it.

By the late '80s, when Damon Wayans as an alien in Earth Girls Are Easy mentioned himself being black, even tho it was with Julie Brown's voice, the black person always had to be the one to reference it.

I think it probably was said on Little House On The Prairie when Ketty Lester joined the show, but series regular Katherine MacGregor may not have said it, a minor dismissable character did.

When Royal Dano called his daughter a 'whore' on Little House, when this episode was rerun, the word 'whore' was silenced (same as when Moses Gunn's episode of The Jefferson re-aired and he said n*gg*r).

At best, as I did suspect, today's uproar over using the n-word probably has spanned from the white youth who listened to it in the rap music, which was the era after mine, and thinking it was acceptable or 'bad-ass' and instead it has become offensive.

This would pretty much also be the first generation who did not grow up in the repercussions of the civil rights era, as I now realize I did do.

One of the most telling bits is if you were a guy, it was funny, such as Hemsley or Gunn, but if you were a woman, such as Nell Carter or someone like Madge Sinclair, whom I'm sure dealt with it somewhere, and Lt. Uhura, it was handled seriously.

Now other shows such as What's Happening dealt with discrimination, but they never used n-bomb. Can't recall if or when Sanford and Son may have, but I'm all but certain they did. Esther may have called Fred such a name once, but that was the joke as to who it was aimed at.

It was a very delicate situation back then still. Nothing has really changed.

Seems like Isabel Sanford said it somewhere, if not in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner or New Centurions, she may have said it once, very seriously again, on The Jeffersons.