Nigga. It's a word that, among black folk, means "brother," "ally," and "friend." It's a word that Los Angeles rapper Kabwasa learned when he was six years old.

One of his elementary school classmates said it at school one day, he remembers. Kabwasa says he's forgotten the details of who and why, but he remembers being confused by what seemed like foreign language. All he could guess by the stunned reactions of his friends was that it must have meant something scandalous.

"I feel like that's how most black kids learn of the word," he says now. Kabwasa's full name is Etienne Green. At 20 years old, he stands tall with a thin mustache and curly hair he's dyed a golden shade of blonde. When he speaks, it's clear this isn't the first time he's pondered his experiences growing up black. "Then they have to go home and be like, 'What does this mean?' Their parents have to give them the discussion that all black people have to go through."

The "discussion" he refers to is about racism in America. It's about slavery, civil rights, and black people's struggle to exert power over their status in a country that has oppressed them. Tangled up in that is the word nigga, a loaded term that has played a complex role in black people's efforts to reverse centuries of socioeconomic damage.

South Bay, CA artist LAMI - whose full name is David Friebe - describes the word as a byproduct of the history of slavery. As such, it's a word that only black people get to hold onto, he says.

"We've been in a place where we didn't have power for so long, and now we can finally take something for ourselves and have something that was once used against us and turn it into a positive," he says. "Now, you have that side effect that it's huge [in hip-hop] and it's mainstream, so everybody's rapping along."

Recently, R&B/hip-hop dethroned rock & roll as the most popular music genre in America. In 2017, Nielsen Music reported that consumption of R&B/hip-hop had risen above all other genres for the first time.

This year, hip-hop artists are projected to hold seven of the top 10 spots on Billboard's ranking of 2018's hottest albums. As black artists have been increasingly pushed to the center of pop culture, the n-word has inevitably followed them.

In May, when Pulitzer Prize-winning rapper Kendrick Lamar chastised a white fan for singing the n-word at his concert, he stoked the flames on a national debate nearly as old as rap itself. The question of who can say nigga isn't a new one. Lamar isn't the first black artist to argue that black people's exclusive ownership over the word hasn't changed despite hip-hip's emergence as mainstream music. Though, he is the arguably the highest profile artist to pause mid-concert to tell his non-black fans as much.

Kabwasa doesn't hesitate to say he'd feel empowered to do the same.

"First and foremost, the music you make is for yourself. You have the right to determine how you think it should be used," he says. "When it comes to something as [significant] as the n-word, the artist definitely has the power to determine that."

Kabwasa began releasing music in 2016. He has written three EP albums, the latest of which - titled "Louder for the People in the Back" - dropped in November. That same month, he earned over 20,000 Spotify listeners - a sizeable amount for a relatively new, small-time artist.

When it comes to his fans, Kabwasa is firm on his opinion that that none of them who aren't black should ever say nigga, even when repeating words in a song.

He praises rappers like Lamar who use their influence to protect the n-word. If more black artists did, Kabwasa says he thinks non-black listeners would be less inclined to use language that clearly isn't meant for them.

What It Means

Nigga is the latest incarnation in a line of n-words that have been used to label black people.

The original n-word, niger, is a Latin word meaning "black." It was first used as a descriptor for African peoples in 1557, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The word remained a relatively neutral term until the late 1700s, when the first hostile use of the derivative form nigger was recorded. As a racial slur, nigger has been used as a tool of oppressing black Americans for centuries. By extension, the word has also been used to extol the virtues of American whiteness.

"Black was dirty, ugly and evil, [while] white was pure and wonderful," sociologist Darnell Hunt explains. He's the Dean of Social Sciences at University of Southern California, Los Angeles and a professor of African-American studies.

He explains that the emergence of the word nigga was an attempt to reverse the oppressive power of the six-letter slur - to rework it into a new, positive meaning for black people. It's a process known in media studies as "transcoding." American blacks, he says, are well-versed in it.

Prior to the 1960s, Hunt says the term black held a negative connotation until the "Black is Beautiful" movement attempted to flip it on its head. The movement sought to combat racism by praising African features that whites deemed ugly. As a result, Black - like the word negro before it - began to lose its sting as an insult, Hunt explains. Instead, it became a badge of pride.

"Black is being part of a community and a history," Hunt says. "Some people argue that's what people who say nigga are trying to do."

However, he suggests that transcoders of the n-word haven't been as successful as they'd hoped. The proliferation of rap music in America, he says, is partly to blame.

Rap, a subgenre of hip-hop, exploded in the 1980s when programs like "Yo! MTV Raps" began broadcasting hip-hop to the world. Throughout the years, rap has been instrumental in reinventing the n-word as a term of endearment.

Among the many rappers who normalized the term, some point to late rap star Tupac Shakur as a driving force. The rapper was adamant and unapologetic about his use of the word nigga in his music. When asked about the term in 1995, he made the definition clear : "Niggers were the ones on the rope hanging off the thing. Niggas is the ones with gold ropes hanging out at clubs."

But much as nigga symbolizes triumph, Hunt says it also represents hardship. The word speaks to the experience of growing up on the streets of inner city America, where life in black communities is often turbulent.

"Rap ... was a response to deindustrialization, the loss of jobs, the incarceration of black and brown youth and a lack of cultural understanding of their problems," Hunt says.

Nigga as a fixture of rap music became a vehicle by which young black men could express their existential situations. Artists like the standout gangsta rap group N.W.A (Niggas With Attitudes) came to lay the groundwork for turning stories of black disenfranchisement into hip-hop anthems.

Forty years later, these anthems make up the largest share of music consumed in the U.S. The struggle for black artists seems to have evolved from claiming ownership of the n-word to holding onto it.

Who Owns the N-word

Rapper Jetpack Jones (full name David Jones) says he uses the n-word in his music the same way he uses it in conversation. He uses nigga to refer to everyone, regardless of race.

"I don't feel like 'nigga' is in a box for only Black people," he says. "Trying to force [the n-word] to have a certain meaning among everybody is insane."

For Jetpack, the n-word is dynamic. It's meaning, he says, can change and with time. If the n-word becomes more democratized with the dominance of hip-hop, then that's "just the cycle of things," he says.

As an artist, Jetpack isn't motivated to exert ownership over the n-word or try to influence his non-black listeners to avoid it. Although hip-hop and the word nigga originated with black people, the Lakewood, CA rapper feels both have transcended black culture. He thinks attempting to claim ownership over them will likely only create unnecessary conflict between artists and fans.

"If it exists, why shun it? Why pretend like it doesn't? Why try to stop people from saying it?" he says. "You're never going to succeed in doing anything. You're just going to create criminals out of people that don't need to be."

Kabwasa passionately disagrees. To think of hip-hop as anything less than black culture, he says, makes little sense. He feels that dissociating nigga from its historical roots shows disrespect for black culture.

When a white person uses the n-word, Kabwasa says it feels almost like cultural appropriation. He explains by describing black culture like a cake black people have suffered to make beautiful.

"We had to get the flour and [white people] poured some out, so we had to get more. Then [white people] turned the oven up and we burned the first cake," Kabwasa explains. "Finally, after all that, we made the cake and it looks good. Then they come over and say, 'Yeah, we did a good job guys,' and they start eating some. We're all going to say that's not right."

What he describes is the basic concept of cultural appropriation.

As a byproduct of colonialism, cultural appropriation allows those in positions of privilege to adopt elements of minority cultures without reverence for their history. Hunt describes it as being a "weekend participant" - someone who jets in and samples a culture without gaining an understanding of its lived experience.

Jones thinks nigga is a "vibrational experience" that other identities that have been historically oppressed can relate to. Plenty of other ethnicities, he says, face the same hardships that black people do.

"There are some mexican people, samoan people, filipino people - people who are brown skinned that might not necessarily check of Black/African-American on the census, but they're living a 'nigga' experience," he says. "Especially here in LA, Black and brown people are - in a lot of instances - one people. The way that we move within this atmosphere is very similar."

Growing up, LAMI says he would hear his Asian and Mexican peers use the n-word more freely than his white classmates.

Norwalk, CA native Kelly Figueroa identifies as Hispanic and used the n-word liberally until her second year of college. She says the was is used heavily in her household, and her parents would call her the word as a nickname growing up.

"I guess it's almost like 'negra' to them," she says. "My sophomore year of college ... I became more educated and realize I have no right to use the word."

Haley Fisicaro, who identifies as white, says she used to say the word in high school when rapping along to hip-hop songs. She, too, began self-censoring herself when she entered college.

"Coming from a place of once being ignorant to saying the word in a song, I realize now the weight that it carries if you're not black and you say it," she says. "There are some songs that aren't for certain groups of people. It's for everyone to listen to but it's not for everyone [to claim]."

Hunt says the tricky part about cultural appropriation is determining who owns various parts of culture in a melting pot like America. When pieces of black culture are being bought in the form of concert tickets and iTunes singles, Jetpack says it's futile to attempt to influence how audiences interact with the music they pay for. On the other hand, Kabwasa argues that commercializing hip-hop doesn't relinquish black people's ownership over hip-hop or the culture it's intrinsically part of.

"When we sell rap music, we're not selling the culture to you. You don't buy the CD and all of a sudden you're Black," he says. "Just because you bought something that came from that culture doesn't mean that you're suddenly part of the culture and are entitled to everything."

Somewhere between Kabwasa and Jetpack's perspectives lies LAMI. He hesitates to say that it's artist's responsibility to scold non-black fans into censoring themselves. That, he says, requires cultural education that goes beyond artist-to-fan interaction.

But he stands firmly behind the argument that hip-hop is a fixture of black culture. He agrees that the genre's induction into the American mainstream has caused unrightful appropriation of the n-word.

He admires artists like Oregan-raised rapper Amine, who earlier this year encouraged non-black fans not to say the n-word during one of his concerts. In April, one month after Lamar's show, Amine performed his song "Caroline" at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. The song only features the song four times, but the artist still amended his lyrics to say, "If you ain't black, don't say it."

LAMI says he supports artists using creative methods to suggest their non-black listeners opt to skip the word.

Our culture is mainstream and people can just take all the positive stuff from it [...] and be rewarded for it without having to experiencing the negative parts of having to wear this skin." he says. "It's important that nigga, even if it's [normalized] for us, is still just for us."