A foolish young black teen, who is growing up in an area that is evenly split between middle class to wealthy whites, and working class recent Latino immigrants with just a tiny sprinkling of middle class Asians but virtually no other blacks, recently tried to argue with my son that the acceptability of the word depends on whether there is a "hard r" or not. Utter white nonsense, but black entertainers encouraging/allowing this foolishness have stupid kids believing there is a difference. (I don't blame the kid's parents, because they are relatively recent immigrants for whom English is a third or fourth language.)