This The Roots (RT) interview with Reginald Hurling (RH), producer of Django Unchained, should lay to rest the debate about the film and use of "nigger" in the dialogue.
TR: Some people feel Django Unchained was able to be made because a white man, Tarantino, told the story. Do you think a black man could have done a movie like this where the victimhood is taken out of slavery?
RH: Sure they could have. Look at the movie The Legend of Nigger Charley (1972) with Fred Williamson. That’s a movie I saw when I was kid, and Fred "The Hammer" Williamson is not a victim. He whooped ass all through that film. It’s not a film on the same scale of Django Unchained, but he wanted to get it made, and he got it made. And it was successful enough to be made into a sequel –The Soul of Nigger Charley (1973) — which they even had a quasi-sequel to that, Boss Nigger (1975). I have to note, if you may have noticed all three of those films have the word "nigger" in the title, yet somehow black people — who are really the only people who went to see those films — supported them enough for there to be three of them.
I guess some people would say we are more sensitive [today]; some people would say we’re soft. I don’t know. I think the point is that we are at a different place as a culture than where we were back then.
http://mobile.theroot.com/articles/culture/2013/02/reginald_hudlin_talks_django_and_nword_house_party_and_the_oscars.html
When I was a kid, radio stations aired my generations’ political songs. They don’t do that anymore for fear of advertiser boycotts. They were anti-war songs and anti-racism songs. “Wake Up Everybody” by Marvin Gay( or was it Harold Melvin and the Bluenotes?) was fave. But another favorite anti-racism song was by Sly and The Family Stone: “Don’t call me whitey, nigger.” That message would not be allowed on air today.