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I can believe that you've seen not-black people use the a-variant in front of black people without issue. My prior is that they were close friends.
Your first link opens with a number of statements about how the author views white people using the a-variant as strongly objectionable, even in the most innocent of contexts, even singing along to a song by themselves in private, with the reaction ranging from the instant souring of personal relationships to a prompt resort to physical violence, which the author views as appropriate. Their analysis repeatedly loops back to considerations of context, with no amount of context actually making the use innocuous in the author's view. Their conclusion is that the taboo is probably weakening in wider society, and they are deeply ambivalent about that.
Previously, you've linked to an example of a black person using the word in a public context, which caused significant controversy.
Your second link is paywalled, but from the blurb, it seems to be a story about how personal relationships with people allowed a level of intimacy where an otherwise-taboo interaction became something to bond over. Presuming that's a fair description, I don't think it supports your thesis.
The third article is attempting to engage with the obvious craziness of enforcing the taboo on a word the enforcers use constantly in extremely popular cultural products. It likewise contains numerous references to how, under current conditions, the taboo absolutely exists and is strongly enforced. This likewise does not seem to support your thesis, any more than it would to point to the "n-word pass" meme, where supposedly black kids sell white kids a promissory note for use of the word.
None of this changes the fact that if I have a positive interaction with a black stranger, and exclaim "my man!", nothing will happen, but if I exclaim "my ***a!", I have vastly increased my odds of having a very, very bad time, not least because, even if the event were video recorded, it's entirely possible for either the black stranger or subsequent viewers to perceive the hard-r anyway.
More generally, does this conversation seem productive from your end?
They were not. I saw it many, many times in the halls of a large comprehensive high school, and as far as I could tell most times the people involved were not even acquainted, let alone close friends. The first time was a good 20 years ago, and I was just as surprised then as you are now, but it pretty soon became clear that it was the norm. Which of course is not to say that Ibram Kendi and his ilk would object; I am talking about regular black people.
I don't know why the second link it paywalled, but it discusses the difference between "nigger" and "nigga" and how the use of the former by white people is common and only sometimes objectionable: "Fact is, there is a difference between both words and only with the latter are lines blurred on the acceptableness of use by non-blacks. Yeah, it'd be great if no white person ever said "nigga," but that's unrealistic, and part of the blame falls to black people. We made the word cool. We use it incessantly in the most popular music. We took away its racist connotations so effectively that it's gotten to the point where some white people call each other "nigga" as a term of endearment."
I guess I don't understand why the fact that he might mishear you as saying "nigger" rather than "nigga" says anything about the acceptability of the latter. If anything, doesn't it imply that it is acceptable? If it weren't, him mishearing you would be irrelevant, would it not?
I don't understand the question. I am not the one who brought up the issue. It was another commenter, who made the claim that "nigger" is not offensive because black people use it among themselves. I have no idea how that ir relevant, but that same commenter said, "I'm going down the list of slurs in my head, and can't think of a single one that says a specific negative thing about anybody[,]" so I have no idea where he is coming from.
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