Making fun of people in a way that isn’t offensive is a tight line to walk interpersonally and best avoided altogether in professional circumstances. This is particularly true if you’re making fun of people for fundamental aspects of their identity, like names. How would you feel if your name was on a list somewhere and people were laughing at it and cracking jokes about it regularly? Some people might be okay with this, but I think others might be rather offended by it.
I imagine it depends to a large extent on whether you've heard the same shitty joke about your name - hur dur your name sounds like butt! - from far too many people in your professional life. Remember, this is a list of client names that was created solely for the purposes of ridicule while being passed around internal Basecamp networks. In terms of racism, I'm white and British, and it definitely has a flavour of the cultural racism that was prevalent during the British Empire which, for all its differences, America inherited.
I'd love to hear some, that sounds great.
Hah, cool.
https://boards.straightdope.com/t/english-names-that-sound-f...
This makes no sense to me: aren't native English-speakers of many races? Aren't there non-English speakers of many races also? Moreover, this happens with any pair of languages. I'm not a native English speaker and there are some English names that sound extremely hilarious in my language. I see myself compiling such a list just for fun. I wouldn't expect English people to be offended by this silly thing, which is inevitable: when there are different languages, there are word collisions and some of them are funny.
> people's names - from the Basecamp client list.
Ouch, this is different, then! I did not pay attention to this detail. Now I understand why the list of names does not circulate (but still, I don't get what could be so bad about it).