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[meadowlander]

6. But why specifically their opinion if not to reduce any guilt about liking the song if you can

find at least one person claiming to be Roma who says it's OK?

Surely this is something that anyone can work out intellectually.

You'll never get an entire group of people to agree on what's offensive or not. There's always at least one person who claims "I'm not offended" as if that makes it completely fine for members outside that group to keep using it.

It doesn't become a racist slur if you can't find a single person of that heritage who isn't offended by it. It's a racist slur because it has been used historically to marginalise or disadvantage vulnerable people who don't identify themselves by that term. You don't need to poll the entire population to work that out.

And of course context matters. If members of that group want to use it to reclaim their power, then fine. The syllables of the word don't contain magically offensive powers. The offensiveness comes from who is using how and why.

Not meaning to pile on you, but it drives me bonkers whenever we try to have a serious conversation about why misogynistic terms used in a certain way shouldn't be enabled on this board and without fail there's always one woman commenting that it doesn't bother them and then that's held up by the perpetrators as an excuse to keep doing it. It isn't.