I have taken a week in order to ferment on what has been said.
American cars a useless.
Jap cars are great.
There I have just converted the word American in to a racial slur, nay, a
national slur. A racial slur into
national praise. The great thing about language, any language is the ability to change. During the Bush years anywhere outside of North America being called American can be considered a slight or outright insult if you were in the middle east. In europe, if you were an American and you made yourself known, there would be a high likely hood that people would come up to you and force you to defend your country's actions.
English Speaker A: Heal me... HEAL ME... I'M POISONED! COME ON YOU ARE THE WHITE MAGE!
Japanese Speaker: (Doesn't heal them.)
English Speaker B: He's Jap man, talk like this...
English Speaker B: {{White Mage}} -> {{Thief}} {{Please Help!}}
Japanese Speaker Leaves the Party and quits.
Maybe he wasn't Japanese. Maybe he was from Okinawa. They don't consider themselves Japanese.
The point I am trying to make here is that no matter how careful you are, no matter what you say you will insult some one. I am from Hong Kong. You would call me a Chinese. I would be insulted because one, I am not Chinese, two, I don't like people from mainland China, three, I consider myself a New Zealander above points one and two. There would be no way in hell you would have known that without me declaring so. However I wouldn't give two shits about it. Online I wouldn't bother correcting you. Face to face I would politely correct you. But I wouldn't throw a fit over it because I know that you know that you couldn't possibly know and at the end of the day I don't care. Racial slurs are the weakest for of insults you can use on me and used exclusively by the lazy.
What doesn't kill or maim you makes you stronger. As much as I would like to see the end of discrimination, humans are inherently stupid and the world imperfect. While people should be careful as to what they say, people shouldn't be overly critical of what other people say. How careful you are is up to you and how thick skinned you are is also up to you, but I urge both sides of the same coin to buck up and meet the challenge.
I feel James C's Blog post an over reaction, however it did open up useful discussion and that is all you should have asked for.