In a country that insists on breaking down racial issues into black and white opposites, a new generation of young people -- Asian, American Indian, even white, as well as black and Latino -- has turned away from white and embraces black. In the idiom of the popular youth culture, their generational ID, their password, is the "n" word. Journalist Josh Parr works at several youth centers in the San Francisco Bay Area. This is the second in a series of three articles PNS is wiring today on the "n" word.

OAKLAND, CA. -- "'Sup?" one student says to another.

"Chillin, ninga," comes the reply.

Just to be clear, I am intentionally changing a word familiar to everybody but which is still considered morally unspeakable. My aim is for the reader to hear an old word anew.

"Ninga."

Sound familiar?

"Ninga" resonated through the halls, and when I began teaching I asked, "Why y'all calling each other that? You have any idea what it means?"

"Yeah, I'm a ninga, he's a ninga, she's a ninga," one student shouted, and the class roared.

"You're a ninga, too, ninga!" he said.

Just to be clearer. This was a Native American school in Oakland and all my students were Native Americans. Copying African Americans is nothing new, but this "ninga" thing I didn't expect.

At the Oakland Asian Cultural Center, where I also teach, a 15-year-old Mien girl shouts out, "That fine Negro be da bomb!" as a Chinese boy walks by. When she writes poetry, it flows in what some call ebonics. The images, the tone and topics, come from rap.

When I asked other teachers about why kids were calling each other out like that, opinions ranged from "they look up to gangster rap because they don't have positive role models of their own" to "it's a password... like 'brother'."

At first, the negative implications overwhelmed me. My students were starved for positive cultural icons of their own.

Had I been fresh out of college, I might have said, "By calling yourself ninga, you call yourself a slave, you chain yourself to 400 years of history" -- and only showed my students how little I understood them. But having spent two years in Asia, where I felt a sense of inclusion as the son of a Japanese mother, I came back to America with new eyes.

I had always considered America to be my country, the land where I would raise my children. But the country I returned to, far from feeling inclusionary, seemed obsessed with finding reasons to exclude one group after another, sometimes manipulating Martin Luther King's words to justify it. I witnessed Proposition 187, a spate of Three Strikes laws, repeal of affirmative action, the abolition of welfare. Being a colored man, it was clear that those who held power weren't representing me or my future children's interests.

Watching these students -- whose interests were also ignored -- I realized they felt the same way. In a country that typically breaks down racial issues into black and white opposites, my Asian- and Native-American students had turned away from being "white," with all its trappings of assimilation, to being "black." Rappers like Too Short, Ice Cube -- these were people preaching a new American Dream, people who came from the same neighborhoods my students lived in, who had avoided integration, paid no attention to "Standard English" and expected no shred of "opportunity" except what they created for themselves.

In a twist revealing reality to be stranger than fiction, we had all become "ningas." Words unspeakable to one generation had become commonplace in the next. The word had transcended history, crossed racial lines, and become a new vocabulary of empowerment for many groups outside the pale of the American mainstream.

For my students it is generational ID, a password. They know each other by the way they mean it. Years later, they'll recognize each other -- Asian, Latino, Native American, even white -- by that simple word. It doesn't signify impotence, slavery, being less than human; it doesn't degrade. It IS brotherly, it IS being "down" with each other.

It's a twist many people will never understand.

"Niggas" -- me, you, her, him, us. For those of "us" who understand. And why not? No one owns a word.