^ I hadn't seen her response. She really doesn't sound like the quickest bunny in the forest.
(Also, what does her half Armenian daughter have to do with it?)
Are you saying that people in other countries don't understand that that word is hateful? Genuinely curious. I just can't imagine that.
I'm not from a former UdSSR country, so I can't speak for her obviously.
And just as a disclaimer, I think with a certain amount of mastery of the English language and general education, everybody should be able to understand it's a derogatory word.
What I'm saying is that many European countries, especially Eastern and Middle European countries, historically don't have a huge amount of black population. In fact, it is close to zero. I just googled the percentage of Blacks in Poland (just as a random example for an Eastern European country with historically little immigration).
This is from Wikipedia:
There are also nationality groups of Americans (in 2002: 1,541 of whom 992 had Polish citizenship), Britons, Turks (232, including 74 Polish citizens), Hungarians (579, including 228 Polish citizens), French (2002: 1,633 including 1,068 Polish citizens), Italians (1,367 including 835 Polish citizens), Serbs, Croats, Bulgarians (1,112, including 404 Polish citizens), Romanians, Georgians, Africans, Palestinians (229 including 146 Polish citizens), other Arabs, Kurds, Bengali, Scandinavians, Chechens and Vietnamese, who constitute small ethnic communities within major cities such as Warsaw, Kraków, and Gdańsk. And various ethnic groups from the whole world like Zulus (92, including 52 Polish citizens), Kurds (91 including 62 Polish citizens), African-Americans (80, including 37 Polish citizens), Flemings (23, including 10 Polish citizens) etc.
The numbers refer to a census in 2002, they have likely gone up a bit, but still. We're talking about the absolute number of people. 80 African-Americans, 92 Zulus...
Here's another number for 2011:
At the 2011 census, 1,44% of the 39 million inhabitants of Poland declared to be descendents of another single ancestry than Polish.That number includes 418,000 who declared to be Silesians as a national-ethnic identification (362,000 as single ethnicity and 391,000 a second ethnicity) and 17,000 Kashubians (16,000 as single ethnicity).
Even in countries with a higher population of POC like Germany, there are still extremely few in comparison to the US. Of course that doesn't give anybody the right to complete ignorance. But the whole discourse, the impact of the Black Lives Matter movement, also the problematic issues of racial profiling etc., are not NEARLY as present as in the US.
In Germany, there's a sweet that has long been called Negerkuss ("******'s kiss"). The pc word today is Schokokuss ("chocolate kiss"), for obvious reasons. Still there are many people, especially older ones and those on the conservative side of the political spectrum, who don't understand what's wrong with Negerkuss, and they will just continue to use it no matter what. And for some of them (not all, of course), I really believe they genuinely don't understand it.
The word itself is just as bad as in English, and that's what they are told. But it doesn't really come through to them, partly, I believe, because the cultural importance of the word is way different. Until fairly recently, Germany wasn't a country with lots of immigration from African countries. And similar to Poland today, you would have trouble finding a POC on the street. (By the way, even today growing up black in a rural German area will likely mean you're the only POC in your whole school.) What people connect(ed) with the word is a colonial past they don't have much understanding of, and also don't really care about. That's a HUGE difference to the situation in the US.
Once again, that doesn't mean all Middle and Eastern European people should be allowed to walk around yelling the n word. But I think it's important to understand why many of them use the word more naively than an American person probably would.
We had this whole discussion only a few weeks ago:
http://forums.thefashionspot.com/f63/model-behavior-read-post-1-before-posting-10-a-293643-25.html
(the argument I was referring to starts from #374)
).. you just have to understand they don't really have an agenda or malice or are on a mission to disrupt all the progress the US has made to overcome racial tension... when you live outside the US, you are BOMBARDED with American pop culture and you pick up a lot of things based on whatever sounds trendiest or fun to pronounce and.. who knows what they mean in the US!, it's so strong that most young people really believe they understand American culture based on these exports.. it's always a shock to come and realise you had no idea and that people don't even use some words on a daily basis.. or that things that were exported as "American humor" aren't actually that funny or even important and people laugh about things that you might just never get because you lack cultural foundation... 
