It wasn't intended for Archie to be the most sympathetic and real character. I read about this somewhere years ago.

Viewers of the show were supposed to hate Archie and cheer along when he gets "owned" by the progressive skulls full 'o mush. The leftist writers and producers have been completely unaware of how people outside their bubble think for decades... it is not a recent phenomenon.

People didn't hate Archie, though. They loved the character, and the show was a hit. The "good guys" of the show (meathead, Gloria, and so on), as originally intended, became the ones people loved to see batted around by Archie the cat, rather than the other way around.

Archie was gruff and insulting at (many) times, but his insults, to me, never seemed to come from a place of true malice. Much of the time, he was making a valid point, and other times, his offhand comments like listing "blacks, Puerto Ricans, and regular people" seemed more like a quaint, even charming indication of his limited perspective more than anything actually bigoted or hateful.

To Archie, white people were "regular" people, and while you're not supposed to say it, it's human nature to think that people "like you" are "regular," because from your perspective as one of that kind of people, they are. Archie simply didn't know, or didn't care, that it was considered inappropriate to say so, and to me, he always seemed to say it with an air of innocence, not from a place of hate.