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I'm of Italian descent.
When I was in college (in the dark ages), my father was helping me move out one year and a male friend was helping me carry some heavy items out to the car. He was Romanian and we called each other Wop and Gypsy.
He was carrying a box and he yelled to me (paraphrasing), "Wop, wtf is in this g-d thing?!? Did you pick up every effing rock from the yard and put the MF-er in here?"
The point being that almost every other word out of his mouth was an expletive, but my dad only heard one-Wop. I've only seen my father come unglued on a few occasions in my life and that was one.
While I knew the history of the word (same with dago), it didn't have the emotional resonance to my generation that it did to my father's. His end point, "He doesn't get to use that word. And you don't get to call him Gypsy. Neither of you have the right."
There are things that simply require belonging to the group in question in order to have the right to say them, no matter how innocuous the intent.
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