A hip-hop music producer testified yesterday that a white youth’s use of a racial epithet during the baseball bat attack of a black man does not prove that the crime was racially motivated.

In state Supreme Court in Queens, the producer, Gary Jenkins, told a jury that the racial epithet, which prosecutors have referred to as the “n-word,” has entered mainstream usage through hip-hop music and has been partly defanged of its offensive meaning.

“It’s been permutated and morphed by a generation of younger people who moved it around and changed it into a matter of parlance,” Mr. Jenkins, who is black, said. “There has got to be more to it than a word to find that someone is racist.”

Mr. Jenkins testified at the hate crime trial of Nicholas Minucci, 19. Mr. Minucci, who is white, is charged with clubbing a black man, Glenn Moore, 23, in the head with a baseball bat last June in Howard Beach, Queens. The victim, Mr. Moore, testified last week that the defendant called him by the epithet during the attack. Prosecutors have claimed that Mr. Minucci singled out Mr. Moore based on the color of his skin and have pointed to Mr. Minucci’s use of the n-word as evidence.

If Mr. Minucci is convicted of assault as a hate crime he can be sentenced up to 25 years; if the jury convicts him of a non-racially motivated assault he faces a lesser sentence.

Mr. Jenkins said he would have to know the cultural milieu Mr. Minucci lived in before he could decide whether Mr. Minucci spoke the word as a hiphop “aficionado” or as a white racist about to commit a hate crime.

One of the prosecutors, Michelle Goldstein, was skeptical of that argument.

“A hip-hop white kid, or a regular white kid, is there a difference?” she asked.

Mr. Jenkins said there was.

“You have to know how the word is being used and who’s using it,” he said. “Just like us lawyers have our club and we wear our suits and carry our litigation bags, a white kid with gold fronts and sagging britches, wearing his hat sideways …is an official hip-hopper and he gets a pass.”

Mr. Minucci has not testified so far in his own defense.

Mr. Jenkins is an entertainment attorney and is president of the urban division of Sasso Records, based in Harlem, he said. He was formerly the general manager of Uptown Records where he worked with hip-hop and R&B luminaries, including Sean Combs and Mary J. Blige, he said outside the courtroom. After reading about the case in the newspaper, he contacted Mr. Minucci’s lawyer, Albert Gaudelli, to volunteer his testimony as an expert on hip-hop culture, he said.

Mr. Jenkins will not get the final word in this trial on how the racial epithet is used in contemporary urban culture. Mr. Gaudelli said a Harvard Law School professor who wrote a book on the word’s usage, Randall Kennedy, will testify Wednesday afternoon.

Mr. Jenkins acknowledged that many people still associated the word with either lynchings or the resistance that the civil rights movement once faced.

“It is a negative word and a hateful word,” Mr. Jenkins said. “My people have been hung by that word … I wish it would disappear.”

When Ms. Goldstein asked if he knew what Mr. Minucci meant when he used the word on the night of the attack, Mr. Jenkins replied: “Only God would know.”

Ms. Goldstein replied: “that and Nicholas Minucci.”

Judge Richard Buchter ordered that comment stricken from the court record.