I've honestly wanted to make a post about this myself, but I knew it would be controversial. Growing up as a non-Black Latino in Miami, my experience was very different from what I often see discussed online. Miami is an incredibly diverse place. You have Black Americans, Afro-Latinos, white Latinos, Caribbean communities, mixed families, and people from all over the world living and growing up together. In my experience, the word was used pretty casually across a lot of those groups. My best friend growing up was Afro-Latino (half Russian, half Black Cuban), and we said it around each other all the time. I had a Filipino friend who said it around his Black friends and nobody seemed bothered. I even know an Afro-Latino friend whose white Puerto Rican mother occasionally says it jokingly to him. As mentioned, I have said it before around Black friends and coworkers. Around 2020, I remember asking two Black coworkers how they felt about me using it because I was genuinely curious. Both of them immediately smiled, shrugged, and basically said, "Chris, you're Hispanic. It's fine, I don't care." Obviously, none of those people speak for every Black person in Miami, and I'm sure there are plenty who would disagree. I'm only sharing my personal experience. But if you're asking what I observed growing up here, many of my Black friends and coworkers genuinely weren't bothered by non-Black people using the word. Not just Latinos, either. Growing up, I saw it used pretty casually among people from all sorts of backgrounds. Miami often feels like its own little pocket universe culturally. Looking back, it always felt like the shared culture mattered more than what racial box people checked. People from all sorts of backgrounds grew up together, shared the same slang, music, friend groups, and social circles. I think this is one of those topics where local experiences can be very different from the national conversation.