Back before the show “Rescue Me” went completely off the rails, there was a great episode where Denis Leary and the boys in his firehouse were ordered to go to sensitivity training. The training session went awry when the racially-mixed fireman started keeping score on which ethnic group had the most offensive nicknames. They were talking volume and level of offense taken at the utterance of such epithets.

Me and my racially group of friends had these same kind of conversations, except that we weren’t racially mixed, we were a bunch of young dumb white guys. But I had black friends confirm our findings: there’s not really a racial epithet you can sling a white person’s way that carries the venom that a word used over-and-over-again by rappers carries for African-Americans. But my thinking has evolved.

There is a word you can call a white person that carries with it all sorts of horrible implications, and that word my friends is RACIST. (more…)