Regarding language, I'd just advise that people try to be as respectful as possible when others do get offended by whatever word has been used. If it comes down to the individual or small, tight-knit groups, just do your best to apologize the first time around and get an understanding of why it's considered offensive, and try to use other phrasing when talking to them again in the future. If that sentiment is widespread enough, then try to avoid it entirely. There are so many words in the English language, it's impossible to keep track of every definition.
On the main topic, I have a few thoughts:
First, for individuals and families that are homeless, it sounds like the best solution anyone has found is just to
give people housing, no questions asked. Most programs up until now have required some sort of stability beforehand, but that's inherently difficult if you don't have a place to go or keep your stuff on an ongoing basis. This should be tied in with health support service for both mental and physical problems.
For folks on other rungs further up the economic ladder and in perfectly good middle-class or better positions, there's a lot of other stuff going on, but it's harder for me to tease apart and understand. A lot of the disparity out there isn't necessarily coming from "racism", but unconscious biases that have formed over time. I know I've had to work on how I perceive black people when encountering them on the street, and I know I'm not where I'd like to be (though better than I was).
Research has shown that people from a wide variety of racial backgrounds (including blacks) tend to be less trusting of dark-skinned faces versus light-skinned ones -- that's quite the little brain-buster. Does that mean that black people are racist against themselves? We basically lack the words to describe what the heck is going on there.
One of the simplest ideas is that our brains are pattern-matching machines, so whenever we see one type of face, we immediately have certain associations based on other similar faces we've seen in the past.
To pull this away from race for a second, just think about how actors often get typecast in certain roles. A face that we might think of as being lighthearted and happy-go-lucky, or alternately evil and murderous might just be based on a casting director's choice for a recent movie -- and that person's choice was probably fed by movies, TV shows, and plays that he or she had seen in the past.
It's important to remember this when meeting new people -- the old advice about not judging a book by its cover should always be hanging in our minds, and that goes for a person's voice and mannerisms as well as their looks. (Hell, politics has become something of a beauty contest, which is really frustrating -- don't vote for someone just because they're physically attractive.)
Anyway, unfortunately, there are a lot of patterns that have been found where people are less trusting and more likely to complain about the actions of others who have darker skin. This ranges from more frequent and severe punishment for bad behavior in the kindergarten classroom (which is exactly the same level of bad behavior as from white kids) all the way on up to institutional, police, and interpersonal interaction between adults.
I bring up the classroom example because I heard that Texas had started collecting statistics on when kids were sent to the principal or had other punishment at school, and found a very stark difference between the rates for white and black kids. I'm not sure if they've made much of an effort to correct that so far, but that's definitely one critical thing to fix. Ensure that kids are being treated equally and then it will mostly be a waiting game as they grow up and push out us old fogies.