Oh shut up the lot of you..with a few exceptions ;) As somebody else has posted maybe everyone should take a deep breath. With few exceptions everyone from Europe is a mongrel..me, I'm irish/english/manx..not the cat, my wife is..jewish/russian/scandanavian, which I think is just showing off.
Now we're all different and react differently to percieved insults. Among my mates it's considered amusing to call each other hippies (none of us claims to be Oscar Wilde) but if somebody who wasn't a biker were to call us that some folk would get..ahem..irate. Some of my black mates call each other nigger, one of them calls asians pakis but if one were to call them bigots they'd be mortified. But then that's Liverpool for you :)
I think that you have to take account of the meaning and mindset behind a word, if no offence was intended then perhaps a word to one side would be a way of dealing with somebody who just didn't really understand. Anyone who's seen 'Rush Hour' will remember the bar scene where Jackie Chan, with a big smile on his face says
'What's up, my nigga?'
Anyway I must be going as my white robes are in the wash and need to be dried before the big Klan meeting tonight