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That's it, that's exactly it. It's generational.
When Nic was born, he was born into an era that had just figured out that they had been massively wrong about race relations and racial/cultural differences, and it was critically important to society that they change attitudes in the space of a generation. (The generations previous to them had been busy saving the society in different directions.)
When Warch and I were born, we were on the cusp; they were still trying to figure out what went wrong with the first attempts to get everyone to change, and why it had led to race riots, suburban white flight, etc. We were schooled in thinking the right direction, but the people teaching us were still scarred by the recent past history. They were anxious, jumpy, uncertain.
People now in their 20s were born into a world where many of the really terrible problems hadn't existed for several decades, and even the upset of changing the culture was pretty much over. What was left, though, was the weird taboos and some of the weird anxiety.
Nic's anxiety literally is, if we keep this kind of thing up it will make us culturally liable to repeat the mistakes of the past. This thinking is bred into him as he is a product of the society he was raised in. If we don't solve our differences it may eventually cause our breakup as a culture.
Warch's anxiety is a result of being raised after Nic's generation: we are all one multi-culture and so the big mistake that we make is offending people in that culture. It isn't that we irreparably damage our culture; it's that we may damage people within that culture, which is insensitive, uncaring, and damages us in different ways.
The next generation sees the anxiety without the cause and wonders, what the hell! The racism that continues is not built into the culture any longer; all the racism they have seen has been rare, usually found after a long search and carefully rooted out. It's more likely to be individual cases of extended idiocy.
I think the real change has happened in the last 7-8 years. Consider the use and meaning of the word "nigger". In the 50s, it was a casual racial epithet. By the 70s it had become the "big" epithet, the single word that indicated bad intent. Through the 80s it became an incredible taboo, which increased its negative meaning. But by the early 90s it began to see regular use in hip-hop culture and actually achieved a positive meaning: it was more often used to indicate brotherhood and common experience than to put anyone down.
Making it a huge taboo was a mistake in the first place. It gave more power to the word than was ever intended. I think that, the younger you are, the more likely the silliness of the taboo is clear to you.
So I think that when younger folk make jokes today they are indicating a togetherness that comes from disrespecting the taboo, acknowledging both the silliness of it and, in a way, noticing that the taboo is no longer so important because many of the root causes are solved.
But I could be wrong.
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