Do I consider being rude and upsetting to be an offense so bad that I wish him to be unemployed (and potentially unemployable due to the Internet never forgetting)? No.
That's all I have to say.
It wasn’t just that he was rude and upsetting. He showed very poor judgment over and over, including after the whole matter came to light. Considering he created this situation where there was none, what can his employer expect when (not if) he encounters more difficult situations and people in the course of his job? In his email apology, he makes mention of being involved in interviewing the co-worker for her job. So, he also had advanced to a certain level of responsibility in this company, responsibility which this incident shows he can’t handle.
And he allowed the racist comments to remain, and added one himself, I believe. On racial matters, the Bible is the standard for me, and his remarks and the remarks he apparently tolerated and approved of were wrong. When the Trayvon Martin shooting happened, I didn’t happen to be working then, and I spent a great amount of time online for months arguing against the media’s completely unjust rush to judgment, if it could be called that, since it was even worse than that. It was more like a kangaroo court prosecution of Zimmerman by the media, with President Obama and some other Democrats also involved. But in this case, which is a firing, not a criminal prosecution, I believe what he did merited the consequences. And I also don’t believe he will be unemployable, even with the internet never forgetting. He knew the perils of the internet, though. In his apology, he claims he changed his profile picture because the previous one of himself included his girlfriend, and she was going through a final interview for a job and wanted her social media presence scrubbed for the time being.