Well this is another fine mess Stanley
My original question was tongue in cheek. A response to this
Rich why don’t you think any of the black people that visit this forum ever say anything about this?
J appeared to be saying that he could tell what people looked like from what they wrote. As i have trouble telling if people are male or female i thought it was a bit funny and basically asked him(?) to clarify what was meant. I didn't expect back the response i got, which i can see now could be equally tongue in cheek. Then again i felt there was other issues raised between us about groups within the US that were percieved as a burden on the rest of the country.
So in the best traditions of the forum i let him have it with both barrels -no offence to the anti gun lobby - premature? Possibly, but quite frankly some of his posts really bugged the sh!t out of me. I'm preachy. He's pompous -imho of course
. No-one's perfect and i enjoy a good debate. I wasn't actually calling him racist. The damnation i felt he'd done was to his arguments about an America that could show Europe how to integrate. The statement could -as has been shown - be taken as racist but i prefered to express it in less flammatory terms i.e. racial sterotype and gross generalization which is something that most of us have been guilty of in here, it just happens we've been talking about cultures rather than skin colour.
So apologies all round. I am a bastard and enjoy a good argument as much as the next person and whilst i honestly read what i read without intentionally trying to mis-interpret it there was a lot that could be mis-interpreted. I do think we are responsible for what we write and cannot expect people to see things that aren't there, likewise we shouldn't deliberately misconstrue things either.
TS
