I do not thing the appropriate response to offensive speech is banning it. I think the appropriate response is to educate people about it.
But most people think it’s easier to ban something. It may be easier, but it means that we don’t have to deal with other people’s offensive thinking publicly. If someone calls everyone “niggers” all the time, we never see it, so we don’t know it’s there and we don’t know a member of our community thinks that way. We are not helping ourselves by banning the speech. We are hiding from ourselves that we have a problem. This applies no matter what the epithet might be. “Fag” and “troll” are a couple of other common names that we ban speech for in some communities.
Other communities ban name calling, with similar results. Everything looks nice, but no one knows the hidden dangers that lurk, and thus no one can do anything about them, and one day they will erupt, perhaps to destroy the community.
Free speech means free speech. It means no holds barred. It means we can put forward all kinds of offensive speech and images, and people have to deal with it .This is better, in my opinion, than banning things that offend the sensibilities of some portion of the community.
Alas for me, there are few who truly believe in free speech. Most people support bans of various types. No one else seems to think there are serious consequences to sweeping so many ideas out of view.