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Notes -
Although it would definitely be thought of as offensive I don't think the word Paki is considered nearly as bad in the UK as nigger is in the US. It's anecdotal but when I was a kid my friends and relatives casually referred to the corner shop as the Paki shop and not in a manner that seemed to imply any genuine racial hostility on their part, likewise to this day Chinese people, restaurants and food can all be referred to as a chinky. I don't think you could unironically use these words on TV without causing a controversy, but at least people from around where I'm from aren't going to assume you're an unrepentant racist if they hear you using them the way I assume people would if you go around casually referring to black people as niggers in the US. It could be a class thing, my family is all very working class from a very white area.
I also can't ever recall the word Paki being censored when the media discussed racism against Asians, such as instances of "Paki-bashing" in which Asians have been physically assaulted for their race. If racist attacks against black people in the US were referred to by a term which contained the word nigger I'd be very surprised if the slur wasn't commonly censored when the media reported on it.
I agree - the point is that "Paki" in the UK is roughly as bad as "Nigger" in the UK. "Nigger" in the US is worse than both, understandably given the history. I don't know how old you are, but when I was growing up in the 1980's in London, both words were fairly widely used by older people because a lot of older people were racist and it was still socially acceptable to be racist in early 1980's Britain. By the time I was old enough to understand such things in the late 1980's, I knew that the polite words were "Black" and "Pakistani". But the British were and still are much more tolerant of rude jokes than Americans if they are actually funny. We all knew that we were being offensive when we asked "How did the Romans annoy the Pakis" but did it anyway because we were schoolboys telling racist jokes in the same way schoolboys told bawdy jokes.
By the late 90's, you could probably get away with calling a Chinese restaurant "Chinky" outside specific PC circles (I have to say that in the circles I moved in it was always "Chink"), but calling an individual Chinese person that to their face was risky. "Chink" was definitely acceptable in jokes ("You are the weakest Chink. Goodbye"), in contexts where rudeness was expected ("Keep the Chink away from my sister") or reclamatory use by Chinese people. I would not have said "Nigger" or "Paki" at all by then unless I was protected by the use/mention distinction or obviously parodying something.
FWIW, the report I link above puts "Chinky" into the worst of the three categories they use, but it is clear from the comments as well as from the no-longer-online raw data that "Nigger" and "Paki" are worse than the other "strong" racial slurs.
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