It's time to let the word go. The meaning changes depending on who you speak to. It's an exclusive word that needs to be marked obsolete.
'Hacker' is different because it's a term that originated with a somewhat positive connotation within and by a community, and got misinterpreted negatively later by the outside.
Yes, the duality in assigning meaning to 'hacker' internally/externally does share some similarity with a group/race-based slur that has been 're-claimed', but obviously not entirely. The n-word seems like a particularly bad choice of example, though.
The discussion of something related to race is not racism in and of itself just the same as the discussion of feminism is not misogynistic.
Going to a news site called Hacker news is not the same thing as defending a word that has been misconstrued and then absorbed by the general public to mean something entirely different. The more you defend the word, the more you separate yourself from general society.