Racial Slurs

    Over the past few days I saw on TV news several repeats of a middle-aged woman crying and very emotionally apologizing to the general public for all of the mistakes she's made. My first reaction was to ignore it, but my curiosity was aroused, and I ran an Internet search.
    I learned that the crying middle-aged woman was Paula Deen, apparently a well-known cook on a TV cooking show. In addition to her TV cooking show, she apparently owns a Savannah restaurant with her brother. Last year, a presumably black ex-employee filed a discrimination suit against the restaurant charging sexual harassment, and working in a hostile environment rife with innuendo and racial slurs. Paula Deen was called upon to give a deposition involving the suit, and she did so on May 17 of this year.
    During the deposition, prosecution asked Ms. Deen numerous questions concerning her racial attitude, presumably as related to her position as an employer. In particular, she was asked whether she ever used the word "nigger". She said that she had, but a long time ago. No indication of when that was or the context in which the word was used.
    From that point on, it is not clear how the matter escalated. It may have been picked up by news reporters, who subsequently pressed Ms. Dean for further details. It is unclear to me, how Ms. Deen could have developed into such an emotional collapse by having at one time called a black person a "nigger". I personally don't see this is a high social crime. I have probably used the word "nigger" myself over many years but likely more in the context of conversation rather than as a derogatory insult, which is not my nature. However, I can understand that other people are of somewhat different temperament and will use derogatory slurs out of anger and many times for the justification of raising themselves to a higher apparent status of desirability. I consider those reactions antisocial, and I have little respect for people who perform them on a regular basis. For an occasional lapse, I am inclined to overlook it, but it still decreases my respect for the character of the person who issued it. A converse racial slur for whites is "honkie", but we hear little about it in the news.
    With all that said, I am not much concerned with Ms. Dean's expletives or her subsequent apologies. I am much more concerned with the fact that our federal government and the US public has placed such an accent on racial slurs as to actually encourage division of the races. We are all Americans. I have several close friends who are black and who are in my judgment persons of highest integrity and in many cases high ability. Their black skins have never been found to be distasteful to me and in fact I never notice it, until I conjure up a mental image of the person. I have no feeling or desire to alienate blacks as a race, any more than I do Indians, or Slovaks or Russians, as nationalities. I see differences in the characteristics of these people. In some cases I see a characteristic as superior to that of my own, and in other cases a characteristic inferior to that of my own. I also see a large differences in characteristics between individuals within the same race or within the same nationality, all of which leads me to the philosophy of my taking a person as I find him, not for outward appearances, but rather for what he stands for, his contribution to society, his track record, and how he treats other people.
    Folks, let's get on with trying to solve some of the problems of our country and get off the kick of which person is better because of skin color, religion or whatever. Take a person the way you find him. If he is favorable to your program, work with him. If unfavorable, write him off and isolate him, but this does not mean to spend your time castigating him. Get on with your own work.