I once was a school teacher in a small town in Maine, my students used
words I found offensive to describe folks of color.  Being impulsive,
youthful and overly sure of myself, I responded with outrage,
exclaiming that I was in fact a black man with a skin disease and was
terribly offended.  It seemed to have the desired result.  The word was
not used again and several students stopped to think.  Still...its the
kind of politically stupid act that brought down the curtain on my
teaching career.  Probably with good cause.  Somehow it seemed
reasonable to tell whoppers when standing in front of an entire class
of students, I tended to err on the brutally honest side one to one.
The problem I suppose is that I continued to err.

Now that I'm an architect, I don't do that.

-jc


On Nov 11, 2004, at 8:35 AM, Jim Follett wrote:

> feeling inundated by an influx of swarthy refugees, tried to "prove"
> that the Armenians were Negroes.