The Meaning of Bean

Ethnic slurs are double edged, use them enough and the become ironic rather than hurtful.

In the case of the Mexican, Beaner, while still patently offensive to me, has lost most of it's intended meaning to most.

In fact, some are rather gleeful about embracing the repurposing of the meaning of beaner, Gustavo Arellano, quoted in the Washington Post, explains:

Gustavo Arellano, a writer for the Orange County Weekly, an alternative newspaper, does a column called "¡Ask a Mexican!" He's heard the term all his life, but says, " 'Beaner' is now nearly an inoffensive term among many Mexicans." He says it sounds funny, outdated, retro -- "like calling an Italian a pizza-eater."

For an Anglo to use it as a pejorative, "it just means they're not up on their racial slurs." Arellano says it's not really used much among Mexican Americans, except as a joke. It has a connotation more like "hick," but it would probably be more common for Mexican Americans in California to call a recent arrival a "wab," he says, which he speculated in a recent column was the mongrelization of "wetback" and "wop," though several of his readers contend that it stood for "walk across the border," or some variation of that.

For the offended among the Latino community, Arellano says: "Get a life. Get some humor. The majority of Mexican Americans like Mencia because he uses those words."