A lawyer, discussing legal regulation of hate speech, did nothing wrong by mentioning the N-word, not using it. Yet she's still been fired by a group that is supposed to protect human rights, which presumably includes rights of expression. She didn't engage in hate speech, she was talking about hate speech. In the current insane environment, even I'm not going to mention the actual N-word (I would of course never use it).
ADDENDUM: A statement from the fired lawyer's attorney (sadly, having lost her job, she's now apologizing, despite having done nothing wrong):
Ms. PoKempner has dedicated her entire career to the protection of human rights. She used the n-word while teaching a class, solely for pedagogical purposes. She was providing a verbatim retelling of an incident involving the deposition of a KKK witness—by the Southern Poverty Law Center—that she had witnessed as a young legal intern. In that story, a lawyer used the word in questioning a KKK witness, to provoke a like response from the witness and get it on the record, which was important to winning the case. Her pedagogical purpose was to inspire a discussion of whether it is ever appropriate to use such language for the purpose of eliciting hate speech, even for the goal of exposing and combating racism. Following the telling, she told the students that when she heard this over 30 years ago that it shocked her. Unfortunately, she did not consider the shock her students would feel and how this stifled the very discussion she sought to generate. She deeply regrets the impact of her words on students and apologized to them repeatedly in class for her insensitivity, and continues to regret her language.”
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