The manager of the EZ Lube next door to my office was fired for the same reason. It was a screaming hot day. A Mexican peddler came around selling ice cold watermelon. The manager bought one for the guys. One of the guys was black. To make matters worse, the manager told the black guy to take a break and get some cold watermelon.
He was fired instantly over such racism. Sadly the manager was from Mexico himself and had no idea that watermelon was racist.
No doubt you're lying.
Offense at symbolism and imagined slights and concocted definitions is very common in the black community. And then there's
this:
One Broward County drug counselor has been fired and another suspended for an incident in which an "N-word" was used. Not necessarily "the N-word," but a word that might have been mistaken for it.
The two sanctioned workers told investigators the word was "niggardly." That word, meaning miserly, is of Scandinavian origin and has nothing to do with race, says an attorney for one of the disciplined workers.
But the county sided with
a substance-abuse client who took offense. He filed a complaint saying a counselor called him "n----- dumb" in a June meeting with two workers at a county rehab center.
In an investigative report, the county's professional standards office said it couldn't conclude "which derogatory racial term was said," but found the workers, who are both white, engaged in "unprofessional, unethical and discriminatory" behavior.
On Aug. 15, the county fired counseling supervisor Eron Tworetzky, a 13-year employee at the Broward Addiction Recovery Center (BARC), for uttering the offensive comments. His co-worker, Gail Suskind-Assidon, was suspended a week without pay for failing to immediately report the incident to her superiors.
The workers are appealing, and the matter might be headed to arbitration.
And
this:
Mayor Anthony Williams accepted the resignation of a top aide, David Howard, after Mr. Howard, who is white, used the word ''niggardly'' in a meeting, offending a black staffer.
And
this:
A fourth-grade teacher at Williams Elementary School has received a formal reprimand for teaching her students the word "niggardly," the teacher's son said Tuesday.
And of course there was this
classic:
Amelia Rideau, a junior English major and vice chairwoman of the Black Student Union, told the Faculty Senate at its February meeting how a professor teaching Chaucer had used the word niggardly (she was unaware of the related controversy, the week before, in Washington, D.C.), and how he continued to use it even after she told him that she was offended. He was trying to explain its meaning--Chaucer used the term--but classmates, she complained, knew what it resembled. "I was in tears, shaking," she told the faculty. "It's not up to the rest of the class to decide whether my feelings are valid."