Yesterday things got tense at a meeting of the Dallas County Commissioners. A Dallas Morning News City Hall blogger picks up the scene:
Commissioner Kenneth Mayfield, who is white, said it seemed that central collections "has become a black hole" because paperwork reportedly has become lost in the office.Commissioner John Wiley Price, who is black, interrupted him with a loud "Excuse me!" He then corrected his colleague, saying the office has become a "white hole."
That prompted Judge Thomas Jones, who is black, to demand an apology from Mayfield for his racially insensitive analogy.
Score two for the Idiot-American community.
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John Wiley Price is a race hustling poverty pimp in the Rev Al tradition.
There IS a cosmic black hole in Dallas, and it sucked up JWP's descency and intelligence.
'Niggardly' is an honest mistake about the original of the word. It's worth noting that there are actual racist-in-origin terms like 'gypped' that people should probably object to first. And the 'Vandal' tribe would have an issue with that word if any of them still existed.
And there's the fact that, for thousands of years, humanity has had darkness as a metaphor for 'unseen' and 'dangerous', and sometimes that arguably is used in a racist sense. But the actual origin of all the metaphors like that is the fact that, for humans, the night and darkness actually is more dangerous than the day, and that doesn't have anything to do with race. It's simply easier for danger to be concealed in darkness.
We don't need to assume all metaphors like 'the dark underbelly of a city' are racist, and people objecting to them are a bit silly. OTOH, perhaps sometime that should be rephrased a little. (1)
But black hole thing is just stupid. Black holes are not bad, and they are not named metaphorically. (Obviously the term was used metaphorically here, but that's not the same thing.)
Black holes are called black holes because light doesn't escape from them, and likewise they are used in metaphors to mean 'places that things don't escape from'. This is obviously bad if you're talking about a place that things should exit, as in the example, but it's good if you're talking about places where things should not leave. (For example, the NSA is a black hole of information.)
It doesn't have anything at all to do with color at all, or even the metaphors humanity has for darkness vs. light. (As has been pointed out, the origin of the name 'black hole' was a prison, and nothing at all to do with race.)
1) Incidentally, dwarfs in Terry Pratchetts' Discworld live underground, and hence think of light and dark in completely opposite terms, because for them it's harder to see in bright light, and have words like 'endarkened' for when they realized something. It makes for some interesting metaphors about good and evil and knowledge.
The trolls, OTOH, have the same weirdness with their metaphors about time. They reason if they can see the past, and can't see the future, clearly they're facing the past. And they base their metaphors off their presumed 'facing direction' of towards the past, instead of the presumed 'movement direction' of towards the future that we use. I.e., they think the past is forward, and they're simply walking backwards into the future. Terry Pratchett has a lot of fun with metaphors and POVs.
These American Negroes are getting stupider by the minute. Where will this end? With us having to call them Master and not making direct eye contact?
I would be embarrassed to have even bothered to comment on such ridiculousness if weren't so scary.
Can we still say "A business is in the Black"? Oh, wait....Thats a GOOD thing, right? Never mind!
please get these racists out of public office. the commissioner, and the judge!
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