Puts me to mind of the time in the early 50s when I was working in a poor section of Newark. Most of the cops were lower-class Italians; most of the other citizens were lower-class blacks. It didn't take long to realize that one sure way to push an Italian's buttons was to call him a motherfucker. And that phrase, at the time, constituted about 25% of the street's vocabulary. There was a lot of head busting.