A bum of Italian ancestry is a W; a bum of Jewish ancestry is a K, and a bum of Negro ancestry is a N.In that essay I observed that this statement, by itself, is not an indicator of true racism. It suggests that the speaker is aware of the basic truth that every ingroup- be it racial, religious, ethnic or political-- has its share of "good apples" and "bad apples." This is such a commonplace to verge on truism, though it's still better than the sort of identity politics that extends the grace of great suffering even upon the rottenest apples in the barrel.
In that essay, I defended that one statement, though I concurred with Alex Nevala-Lee that other Campbell statements were indefensible. But now I'll point out that even though I believe that Campbell's statement as it stands has a basic logical truth, it's utterly useless in a societal sense.
Obviously, Chris Rock can get away with telling a largely black audience that some black people really are "niggahs," because of the way they act. And one can find no small quantity of other examples in which a member of an ingroup uses a slur to apply to himself, but would not accept hearing the same slur from a member of an outgroup.
It's all but impossible for a member of an outgroup-- as WASP Campbell would have been to the three groups he references-- to use any given slur to apply only to the rotten apples of a particular ingroup. The assumption will always be that the slur is being used across the board, and this applies as much to people who claim marginalized status as to anyone else. To cite a personal example, I once happened to provoke the ire of a black panhandler by simply looking in his direction. His precise motives for calling me a nigger I'll never know, but I would guess that-- aside from hoping I'd throw money at him to get rid of his odious presence-- he felt he was getting even with flinging at me an epithet used against his people. Further, I don't think he was using the epithet purely against me; he almost certainly would have used the insult against any white person who ticked him off.
So Campbell's rationale, while consistent logically on its own, has no use-value within culture as a whole. Obviously the only real societal solution of the problem of ingroup epithets is that no one, even without the ingroup, ought to use them. However, making a taboo of any word insures that its power will become even stronger, so neither general nor specific taboos have any use-value either.
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