re: #63 Cato the Elder

It’s precisely the same inversion in German. But try explaining to an American that “Schwarzer” is the pejorative and “Neger” the polite term. Oddly, I’ve seen more white Americans freak out about that than blacks.

I haven’t grown up with racism and racial sensitivity all around me, and it still surprises me sometimes just how sensitive the American consciousness is towards racial words, even ones that aren’t slurs. And yes, it is primarily among white Americans.

Soon after I first got to the US, I was talking to a friend and he was trying to point out someone he knew across a large, crowded hall. We spent ten minutes with ‘that guy, there - in the… suit, next to, um, the blonde girl’, and I even made a couple of trips across the hall to introduce myself to said person, failing both times. Eventually, I started to realise who he meant, and said, ‘you mean the black guy?’

One black guy in a room of 200 people, and he was still so sensitive about using the descriptor that we played a ridiculous dance for ten minutes.