I draw the line at slurs based on race, gender, or sexual orientation. Granted, “cracker” doesn’t have a lot of force behind it (there’s no institutional racism against whites) but that doesn’t make it ok, because when you insult people based on their race, gender, or sexual orientation you aren’t insulting one person, you’re insulting everyone in that group. And that is wrong.
I don’t know if the reality is different, but what is strikingly peculiar in the USA is the public perception of it.
People seem to take as granted that rape is essentially a common part of life in prison (and I’m pretty sure they’re mostly wrong about this), they mention it a lot (it appears in almost every single thread about a sex crime, for instance), and they often unashamedly rejoice about this supposed state of affairs (despite how emphatized the issue of rape is nowadays, and weirdly enough totally ignoring that it could be the “bad guy” who will do the raping in prison, rather than being raped).
It’s completely foreign to what I witness around here. I’ve no reason to assume there are more or less rapes in French than in American prisons, but people just don’t mention this issue, nor to blame it nor to rejoice when some very bad guy is arrested. If you hear about it, it will be in some documentary about the situation in prisons or something like that, and it could be discussed in this context. But there isn’t all this clamouring about prison rape following every crime report you seem to enjoy over there.
It’s weird (and even offensive), really, especially, to repeat myself, in a context where rape is normally seen as about the worst thing one could do.