Well, yeah, it's racist. But more so in America than anywhere else.
It likely would offend black people in general though.
I've never met a single person, black or otherwise that actually uses that word though, which perhaps tells you how rare it's use is outside the US...
And yes, black people themselves seem to use it a lot in the US, but that doesn't mean anything, and doesn't stop it being racist.
Appropriating insults is pretty common amongst marginalised minorities in general.
Now, there will always be some double standards that result from this.
Blackface is largely considered a very bad thing to do (though again it seems to be a bigger deal in the US than elsewhere. Last year I saw a French documentary about a ballet company. They did a performance whose story had something to do with Africa, and pretty much all the children in the performance were completely covered in brown paint, playing african It didn't so much as occur to anyone involved whether this might be racist or offensive, they just did it)
meanwhile of course, there's the film 'white chicks' in which two black men dress up as white women, and nobody cares.
Why? Because it doesn't have any offensive history to it.
that word... Has a very long history to it related to slavery and all kinds of other stuff (such as the implied racial inferiority of africans).
Even though when you remove all this history you are merely left with a word that means 'black' (compare it with the words negro, and the actual words for the colour black in spanish and italian for instance), it is the history behind it, and it's constant use as a term to belittle and insult and imply inferiority, lesser worth, lesser status, and so on that makes it racist.
