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That is probably correct individual level advice, but my gut reaction is to let my Cajun side come out and show up in numbers and intimidate him right back.
And that's the thing, obviously- our society strongly disincentivizes honor-culture retaliation moreso than it does the initial offense, which benefits bad actors. If we really wanted we could set a different equilibrium where the law considers provocation a sufficient mitigating factor to reverse the equilibrium. We don't, though. It probably comes at the cost of much higher levels of assault and murder and the like. We could also set a different equilibrium where our society has a much laxer attitude towards police brutality as long as he had it coming, and gentlemen like this(who, after all, didn't commit a serious crime) could get a beating from police instead of getting arrested to be released later with no charges. The black community's collective neuroticism about police brutality probably takes this option off the table, however.
Now obviously you can't try and prosecute every asshole in the world. You have to pick a set of tradeoffs, and the tradeoff our society picked is one where assholes get a lot of leash. In places like much of Africa assholes don't get much protection from the law, because the law gives only minimal protections to anybody. In East Asia the law cracks down on assholes at the expense of the rights of the accused and general privacy rights. I don't see much of a fourth option. Maybe ancaps have a nice theoretical framework, but every time it's been tried organized crime and/or powerful clans brought us back to "places like much of Africa". I guess in theory you can have a very nice clan-based society where the state prevents actual feuds, but it seems like it's A) not very compatible with liberal individualism and B) prone to the same failure modes as that nice theoretical framework.
This is by design. The initial offense here just isn't that bad. It can coexist with a society that has OpenAI. The problem with honor culture retaliation is it escalates and it's indifferent / symmetric with respect to who was actually "in the right" from the perspective of society's interest in preserving large-scale systems from interference. Allowing such retaliation if a court later judges you're in the right ... well, everyone thinks they're in the right in the moment.
The current equilibrium poorly with "you can't punish the underclass for being violent or antisocial because that's bigoted (not just racist, it's more general than that)", but everything mixes badly with that.
Part of the problem is that things in between 'honor-culture retaliation' and 'shutting up and taking it' are highly discouraged both legally and culturally.
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