Cap'n,
In different circumstances racist humour would be far less of a problem than it is today.
I served my apprenticeship on the Liverpool docks where there was a great deal of inter-racial banter between all the nationalities, with little offence taken (or, I believe intended).
Thanks to scum like the National Front and their malignant offspring, the BNP, we live in a different world today.
Thirty years ago in Ireland, foreigners were treated to little more than polite curiousity and - here in The West (in my experience) given the usual local welcome. That is no longer the case.
A couple of Decembers ago a Traveller family who were made homeless by a caravan fire were driven out of temporary council accommodation into the worst possible winter weather by chanting locals - the youngest of the family celebrated her 1st birthday sleeping in the back of a clapped out car.
Ex-loyalist terrorists in the North have now concentrated their efforts on driving out immigrant families in Derry and Belfast.
You want horror stories - the press is full of them.
One of the arguments put forward in the recent referendumm was that if Ireland accepted the Lisbon Treaty we would be over-run by immigrant Turks (this from a nation which wouldn't have survived the last couple of centuries without the recourse of emigration).
Different world - in which, I believe, there is no room for tolerance of Tommy Tiernan and his mini-Nuremberg rallies.
Without wishing to open old arguments, I seem to remember some time ago, your being racially offended by what many of us believed to be an innocent joke - in that contex; put yourself in the place of the families of holocaust survivers witnessing Tiernen's 'little pearls of wisdom'.
Jim Carroll