Very quickly, I'm off to bed:
1- None of the black people I know take offence at being called black.
2- Yeah, positive discrimination is, technically, unfair. But it is an honest attempt to counter negative discrimintaion, which is also unfair, and is still extremely common.
3- I agree completely that, in an ideal world (and probably one that we will one day see made real) there would be no need for positive discrimination and the same rules would apply to everyone, but at the moment these things are necessary. If the rules seem different for blacks than for whites, it's because black people have suffered hundreds of years of slavery and oppression, and still often have to put up with overt and covert racism. Only by actively foiling racist discrimination can enough ethnic minorities get into the position to help themselves and provide the positive role models the next generation will need to get their on their own without a hand up.
4- as to the point about parades and celebrations- I think you'll find that such celebrations go on all the time. How about Christmas? Easter? Independence day? Even on a day that isn't a major holiday, every day in a predominantly white culture is "celebrate white culture day" to someone who doesn't identify that culture but is living in the middle of it. Remember that many ethnic groups have had their own cultural identities systematically stripped away over the centuries. A lot of african americans don't even know what part of africa their ancestors come from, and if they did, knowledge about the culture and way of life of those ancestors is all but dead. IT may not be obvious to everyone exactly why people need to find about a dozens of generations in their history, but those are usually people who have no problems tracing their own roots and have the luxury of taking their own cultural identity for granted.
5- The N word. I hate that word, and I don't use it, and if I ever did I would rightly expect to get smacked in the mouth by any passing black people. There is too much hate tied up in that word for it ever to become acceptable again, imho. The fact that it has been adopted by the black community (in an attempt to 'reclaim it', apparently) doesn't enjoy unanimous support from the black community. Unfortunately, it seems the most loudest voice for black culture at the moment is one of the least representative and certainly less flattering. I'm referring to the gangster rap culture, which portrays black americans as violent, uneducated, masogynistic, vacuously materialistic arseholes. Of course that picture doesn't apply to the whole of black american culture, but very often that is the only picture getting onto the television and radio, and it leads to a lot of misunderstanding.
Finally, the anecdotal stories of [insert ethnic group here] kids beating up a white kid in a racially motivated attack and walking away scot free. At worst these are urban myths, at best an exception to the statistical rule- particularly in the usa where the insanely oversized prison system is literally stuffed with black people, and something crazy like 30% of black americans can expect to go through the prison system at some time in their lives.
That was supposed to be quick. Ah well, goodnight.
(Everything I ever needed to know about afro-american culture I learned from
http://www.boondocks.net/ - finished reading "Right to be hostile" today, thoroughly recommended. )