Offense is in the ear of the beholder.
But the ear is fashioned by something other than biology in this regard. Like I noted earlier, all words don't carry the same weight and there are reasons why. I can't decide that you calling my grandmother a sexually charged and insulting thing isn't insulting or powerfully so. The insult and impact is rooted in the culture we share and in a biological truth that gives it force. She is a woman and there is a history of powerful denial and pain in the distinction of our sex.
It's the measure of truth and its nature, the thing taken and bent to perform an insult that mostly generates its power.
A word can only offend people as much as they want to be offended.
Continuing my answer, ****** is one of those words. It was used to both identify and dehumanize and is rooted in an old truth shaped into a horror.
If someone calls you a cracker, that is rooted in your race as well, but it's a race that wasn't treated like property, mutilated and raped and systematically denied the right and respect human beings should be born to--and that happened, generationally here, within much of the brief life of our nation and common culture. Some of it within living memory.
The lowest white in our culture, for generations, could sneer and feel and act and literally, after a fashion, be superior to the most powerful and deserving of praise among blacks. He could hang one for smiling at a white woman. He could deny all a vote, the ability to read or walk with their heads up and their eyes on a level. There is nothing in our experience to rival that power so we have no particular reason to think our ability to shrug off an insult that can only reflect a toothless attempt to echo that real, historic power is any statement of comparable restraint on our part.
