Many people consider the terms to be equally pejorative, and the use of nigga both in and outside black communities remains controversial. There is conflicting popular opinion on whether there is any meaningful difference between nigga and nigger as a spoken term. I noticed that among this class of colored men the word 'nigger' was freely used in about the same sense as the word 'fellow,' and sometimes as a term of almost endearment but I soon learned that its use was positively and absolutely prohibited to white men.
The use of nigger non- pejoratively within the black community was documented in the 1912 book The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man by James Weldon Johnson, in which he recounted a scene in New York City around the turn of the century: