Jim
Usually it would mean that he's being friendly.
There is a movement, particularly among black athletes, to rehabilitate the word,
The prejudice against the n-word is fairly recent, dating from the late 1930's when Agatha Christie changed the name of one of her novels to "And Then There Were None."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Little_Indians
Prior to that, Great writers, such as Joseph Conrad and Mark Twain used the word extensively, 214 times in Huckleberry Finn alone.
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/76/76-h/76-h.htm
Christie, Twain and Conrad were not racists.
The Google ngram viewer shows the relative use of the term from 1820 to the present. The drop-off in the 1940s is striking. The comeback in print continues.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=******&case_insensitive=on&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t4%3B%2CNigger%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Bnigger%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BNigger%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BNIGGER%3B%2Cc0
For the foreseeable future, I don't recommend for white southerners like me to use the word, or expect the name of a prominent organization will be changed and abbreviated NAAN.
roderick_young
You would have to ask them to know for sure.