What Makes Stereotype Offensive?

A few days ago, Ben­son Hines posted about some hubaloo about a book (Deadly Vipers) being mar­keted with offen­sive Asian stereo­types, nin­jas, Japan­ese gar­dens, etc.

I’ll be the first to say that I’m a white male and that as such, it’s awful hard to make me feel like a minor­ity. So please under­stand I mean this is in the most hon­est of ways:

What makes the mar­ket­ing for Deadly Vipers offen­sive to Asians but the ad below not offen­sive to Rus­sians (or is it offensive)?

Or for that mat­ter, what makes Deadly vipers offen­sive, but Teenage Mutant Ninja Tur­tles not offensive?

I know this can eas­ily come out dis­mis­sive, like I’m mak­ing fun of the peo­ple who are tak­ing offense.

I’m not. I’m on the out­side look­ing in on this on and am try­ing to under­stand it. Where’s the line between using offen­sive stereo­types and appro­pri­at­ing a style? What’s at the root of the offense, ie. what makes Deadly Vipers (or any other sim­i­lar use of a racial stereo­type, Chief Illini­wek, for exam­ple) offensive?

Ask­ing this ques­tion on my blog prob­a­bly isn’t the most effec­tive forum for this question–I’d be will­ing to wager that my reg­u­lar read­ers are pre­dom­i­nately white and male, the his­tor­i­cal major­ity, and I’m mostly inter­ested in the opin­ions, or more accu­rately, the feel­ings, of peo­ple who aren’t in that minor­ity, the peo­ple who feel mar­gin­al­ized, and who find these things offensive.

What makes them offen­sive? And what’s the dif­fer­ence between some­one using an offen­sive stereo­type and some of those influ­ences per­me­at­ing and becom­ing influ­en­tial parts of the larger cul­ture? Or is the lat­ter offen­sive some­how as well?

This is a pretty com­plex issue–I’m not nec­es­sar­ily inter­ested in fig­ur­ing out the ‘solu­tion’ per se, as much as I am inter­ested in what it is that makes peo­ple feel offended and why.