'C' Word the New 'N' Word?

Ran across this odd bit of politically incorrect trivia from Canada's National Post a while back and still don't know what to make of it.
Of course, I lead a sheltered life these days.
In short, the new way to note a black person's race without coming right out and saying it is to call him or her Canadian.
It showed up in an email referring to the unlikely presence of "Canadians" on a Texas jury which included several black people.
It was reported by Fox News.
It shows up in an online directory of racial slurs. It's a matter of discussion among black people in the Southeast.
And linguists have taken note.

A University of Kansas linguist said that a waitress friend reported that "fellow workers used to use a name for inner-city families that were known to not leave a tip: Canadians. ‘Hey, we have a table of Canadians.... They're all yours.' "

Stefan Dollinger, a postdoctoral fellow in linguistics at University of British Columbia and director of the university's Canadian English lab, speculated that the slur reflects a sense of Canadians as the other.

"This ‘code' word, is the replacement of a no-longer tolerated label for one outsider group, with, from the U.S. view, another outsider group: Canadians. It could have been terms for Mexicans, Latinos etc. but this would have been too obvious," he said. "What's left? Right, the guys to the north."