Reply #94: I think that you've articulated it very nicely

[Orrex]

By reciting a made-up newscast in a bad caricature of Chinese, she's giving an ignorant commentary on a language that she doesn't understand (neither do I, for that matter), and the particular way that she did it has a belittling tone that commits the bulk of the offense, I think. It carries a sort of "it all sounds like gibberish" vibe which, in its particular "ching chong" formulation, smacks of "they all look alike to me." She probably didn't intend that, exactly, but that's how it comes across.

Contrast that with the timely joke on last night's The Office, in which Steve Karel was nominally dating an Asian woman but couldn't tell her apart from her friend (to the point that he actually marked his date with a pen). The joke there, as framed, is obviously on Karel's character, rather than on any impenetrable similarity of appearance between one woman and the next. For the record, they didn't really look that much alike anyway, so the joke is made even more absurd.

I don't think that anyone who immitates and accent or dialect is necessarily committing a slur, but what Rosie did knowingly was to reduce a language to a juvenile caricature, and that's where the problem came about.