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Notes -
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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