Sure you can, at least with me. If things ever start to get heated, we call it off and take a moment. I don't take offense easily. I admit I'm sensitive, but I rarely just assume a friend is trying to seriously take the piss out of me. But like I said, always feel free to let me (or anyone else here for that matter) know if I go too far as well, because I certainly don't want to hurt anyone's feelings, and give me the benefit of the doubt that I would certainly not intend to.
So, carrying on...
Warbler said:
except he wasn't on trial.
let me put it this way. We back when this originally happened and first heard the word niggardly, which sounds just like the n-word with a suffix added to it. You never never heard nor knew anything about the word niggardly. If you had to bet your whole life savings on whether or not niggardly had something to do with the n-word, and you couldn't look it up or do any research on it, what would you do? I bet that it had something to do with the n-word cause 99% of the time, I'd be right. This was just the 1% that I wouldn't be.
Except he was on trial. Not an official one. But he lost his job over it. Debating over someone's job is not an instance where you have to bet everything in a single moment without the aid of any kind of resource materials. And it certainly isn't an instance where it should be. Not that I think that's what happened in this scenario. I really think it's more of a case of bowing down to pressure. Playing the racism card is really an easy out for pretty much everything. It's the squeaky wheel that gets the oil. And it's because of that that the idiot aide isn't the focal point of this controversy. HE should be. Because he passed from ignorance to idiocy when he lost a man his job on a ridiculous, trumped-up charge, without bothering to educate himself before foolishly playing the race card.
I'm not sure if you read through the whole Wikipedia article I linked to, but this is what Julian Bond, then head of the NAACP had to say about the incident:
"You hate to think you have to censor your language to meet other people's lack of understanding", he said. "David Howard should not have quit. Mayor Williams should bring him back — and order dictionaries issued to all staff who need them."
Also, according to Wikipedia: "Bond also said, 'Seems to me the mayor has been niggardly in his judgment on the issue' and as a nation we have a 'hair-trigger sensibility' on race that can be tripped by both real and false grievances."
So, yes, a quote from not only a black man, but a black man in the number one position of wanting to stop racism against black people condemning the reaction of ignorant, overly-sensitive people. Because he realizes, I'm sure, that playing the race card prematurely and being hypersensitive will do nothing to either further race relations or further intellectual enlightenment.