When I grew up, nationality slurs were different then racism which were different than religious slurs. It's only recently that people lump these together. Slurs against Jews or Catholics for example were religious slurs. Slurs against Italians or Jews or Irish would be nationality slurs. Slurs against people of color were racial slurs. Today, all three areas are called racial slurs. It's all the same because politicians find it convenient to lump them together to divide people. Like I said, none of it is right. We should get past these things.
Alan, I do get what you're saying here. I grew up (DC area) in a very integrated area, and my best friends were a mix of average white WASPy kids (me), three Vietnamese guys, a Filipino, a reform Jew and a another guy who was reform-ish conservative, and who over time went full Orthodox (I just went to his wedding in Brooklyn a few years ago - it was fascinating. We threw him around on a chair...)
All of us teased each other with stupid stuff like how the Jewish guys always wanted to go to a cheap place for dinner, the Asian guys wanted to get Pho, etc. etc. Stupid stuff, but the kind of things close friends can tease each other about, acknowledging stereotypes with a wink and an inherent acknowledgement that these things exist, but that they don't ACTUALLY define us. Today, my wife and I will tease each other about who's whiter (It's her - I promise), and our son, who's black, loves to jump in and give us a hard time about it as well (which actually sometimes leads to some great conversations and has provided me with a lot of personal growth)
But that's not appropriate for me to say to the general public, because they don't know my background or that these things come from a place of familiarity, and maybe that's a problem - maybe everyone shouldn't be so sensitive. But regardless, were I to use that kind of language with my opponents of color on a national stage, can't you see how this these things - the stereotypes, the assumed default position of my whiteness as the standard to which everything else is measured, and the standard of what constitutes "real" Americas - plays on racial assumptions and tensions, even if I'm not going full on Klan and outright saying that brown people are inferior?