Are you really saying that there's no middle ground between being actively offensive and being insufferably bland?The short answer is, yes, there is a middle ground, but it won't stay "middle" for long: the set of "offensive" things expands with time. Many jokes and phrases that were part of the inoffensive "middle ground" twenty or thirty years ago are now considered offensive. To the politically correct, this is mere progress, but to those who oppose political correctness it instead represents cultural and linguistic decline.
I ran into a small example of this recently when discussing the movie "Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle". Specifically, I wanted to refer to the ethnic background of Harold. I couldn't remember offhand exactly which country his ancestors came from, so I described him as "Asian". The problem is that, in the modern lexicon, Kumar (being of Indian extraction) is also "Asian". Thirty years ago I could have described Harold as "Oriental" without causing offense, but that changed some time in the mid- to late '80s. (I distinctly remember, some time around 1990, overhearing a high-school teacher instruct one of my Vietnamese classmates not to refer to herself as "Oriental". She was comfortable with the term; he was not. His side won, and we have lost some linguistic precision because of it.)
To cite another example, from 1555 until the 1960's the word "Negro" was a neutral term signifying a person of black sub-Saharan African descent, at which point it was replaced by "black" (or "Black"). This lasted until 1988, when (in a domestic context) "African-American" became the preferred term. Meanwhile, "colored person" was also once a neutral phrase (as evidenced by the NAACP), but now uttering it in the workplace (or in a joke) can get you fired. In contrast, the term "person of color", which is almost semantically identical to "colored person", is not only inoffensive but is the preferred term among the PC cognoscenti. It's an achievement that Orwell himself could hardly have surpassed.