- The speaker is an African American by the name of Ta- Nehishi Coates. In the first paragraph Coates himself writes, “ My father’s name is William Paul Coates. I, like my six brothers and sisters, have always addressed him as Dad” ,besides stating that he has siblings and a dad he is also married.
- The occasion is to bring awareness to the situation in which players were called on to stop using “the worst and most derogatory word” after incidents regarding the Miami Dolphins, the Los Angeles Clippers and the Philadelphia Eagles leading up to a funeral of the word in Detroit .  As Coates explains the meaning of a word deprives from the context and the main problem is that black people are exempted from a basic rule of communication.
- The audience Coates is trying to reach out to African Americans because he mentions the word “we”.
- The purpose is to emphasize that whether inappropriate words are said it’s the context and relationship it comes from that gives the word meaning like how two of his Jewish friends joked that I’d “make a good Jew”, gay men laughing as they referred to one another “faggots’ and how his wife and her friends referred to each other as “bitch”. But basically to point out that It would have been a different story if the words were being used in a different context being offensive.
- The tone is serious while Coates expresses that they are being excluded from a basic rule of communication for example he states, that n*gger ” is different because it is attached to one of the most vibrant cultures in the Western world. And yet the culture is inextricably linked to the violence that birthed us”.
- I agree that we depend on context in order to deprive the meaning of a word, it is different when your friend addresses you as “bitch” than when a stranger who’s frustrated addresses you like that. Also when he states that he has never called his father Billy, even if strangers or friends addressed his father as Billy he shouldn’t address his father like that because there are words sometimes said simply as a sign of respect.
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Language and Identity
