> I noticed that the thread about hackers somehow evolved into a discussion of people who hate. I like to call them bigots, but the truth is, I feel sorry for them. I grew up in a time when Jim Crow was still a wide spread concept. I saw signs over lunch counters that said "White Only." and water fountains labeled "white" and "colored." There were "colored" waiting rooms in bus and train stations, and once on the bus, there was a sign that read "coloreds seat from rear." The town where I lived, like many other towns, had a "colored" section, with dirt streets and no street lights. After we moved from Kentucky to Florida, I became aware of hotels and motels that would rent only to white people and even saw a few with "gentiles only" signs. As a kid, I had accepted these things as normal and thought little about it. Then one day when I was 16, (1949) I heard a guy mean mouthing a man I knew and liked.
> He was using slur after slur, and saying things about the man that I knew were not true.
>
> Very suddenly, a light came on in my head. There was something dreadfully wrong about the whole system. These people were victims. They were being treated unfairly. They were being abused without any reason. The bigots were wrong.
> Black people (I probably still thought of them as colored because terms like "Black" and "African-American" had not yet come into use.) were really no different from anybody else. They worked hard, raised families, paid taxes, and did all the same things everybody else did. How could they be treated like that? Believe it or not, this all came to me more or less in a flash. That day changed my thinking forever. Maybe I was a developing bigot. If so, I wish all bigots could have a day like that.
> Howard

I don't think you were a develpoing bigot. My grandmother used the N-word for blacks, because that was the name she had always used. Other people in my family used it in the derogatory sense. I don't use it at all, except when quoting Mark Twain or Chris Rock...maybe that's not so good of an example. I don't know. But anyway, the fact that you recognized that treating people "seperate but eqqual" was wrong shows that you were not a bigot.

Randy"Man it's early to be talking about this stuff"K