A Racial Slur Becomes Magical

First, of course neither of these people used the racial slur in question. Both mentioned it. Second, this is another insane development in the march of political correctness. The word isn't magical, it's not orders of magnitude worse than other slurs and vulgar terms. It doesn't invoke Satan.
   You can learn a lot about PC from thinking about this. When I was a kid, it was a crude, racist slur that nobody used in public. There were older rural people who used it purely descriptively, and without malice in certain situations. But, in the main, you marked yourself as a stupid asshole for using it. Nobody would use it, say, on television.
   Now it's used indiscriminately by blacks in mass media...which was weird enough...but, furthermore, any white person who might speak it even oratio obliqua is treated like a child-murderer or something. Obviously some doubleness of standard is understandable. And not even peculiar nor difficult to understand, to my mind. It's similar to, say, the fact that you can call your friends all sorts of things that would get you punched were you to call a stranger the same thing. But this degree of asymmetry isn't rational. It seems to have become not about the word anymore. It's become some bizarre political power thing. Maybe it's progressivism working to see how absurdly radical they can make the double standard.
   It's rude, but it's not magical. And it's protected speech. People are going to have to get their minds right about this at some point.