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For what it's worth, I tried a couple of things in my word processor when I read about this typo.
P and O are right next to each other, so it seems reasonable to me that someone typing fast can type p e o p instead of p e p p for the first 4 letters. If I typed p e o p e r the spell checker offered "pepper" but if I didn't hit the final r, it offered "people".
So I can see this being a typo of the regular sort with one finger slipping and hitting o for p and another finger not hitting the r quite hard enough to register. It's not often that I make 2 errors in one word, but it does happen, so I assume it can happen to other people too--and it seems a lot more likely that this would be a typo than that someone would have done it on purpose.
Regarding the typo being offensive--sure, I picked up pretty quickly that it was a typo and hadn't been done on purpose. But wow, it's the kind of typo that makes *me* wince--and I'm white. I can sure imagine that to someone who was black it might not be all that funny. And being basically brushed off by the company would make it a lot worse. And then having a bunch of white boys say "how dare you be offended" and "now *I*'m offended that you're offended" and "you must just be looking for things to be offended over" would make the whole thing ten times worse.
Which is the point, for some people. If they make things hot enough for minorities who speak up, they can pressure most of them into shutting up, and then they can go back to believing the world is fair.
Nobody here would be like that, of course. But it might be good to stop and think a bit about whether you want to be mistaken for someone who is like that.
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