> From: GUEST,sturgeon
>
> NFN.

Typical hypocrisy, you come over all PC against Eliza for her using a term like negro perfectly within it's non-racist meaning, and then yourself use a far more pejorative stereotype like 'NFN'.

'Thinking', so-called, in terms of stereotypes - whether of race, religion, age, sex, NFN, or whatever - is not really thinking at all; it's exactly the opposite, it's a cop-out from thinking. It's not being arsed to think. It has no place in a rational discussion about the world.

> From: GUEST,Eliza
>
> By the way, I was chatting two weeks ago to a man in his seventies who was here on a visit from South Africa. He was terribly scathing about 'The Bleks' (as he pronounced it) and inferred that they were feckless, lazy and dangerous, and were ruining 'his' country. He said he used to be a big farmer out there and had had several 'house boys' (his words) who for a few pennies would do all the work in and around his property. I was astonished and disgusted that such an attitude still prevails out there. Maybe he was a one-off. He was incredibly racist.

I fear not. Back in '79/'80, I was at a UK agricultural college, and there were a number of white colonial students there, who were almost to a man repulsively racist. They wouldn't sit next to any of the black students from African countries, and, if there were no other seats left when a late black arrival came, so that (s)he had to try and sit on the end of their bench, they'd abuse them with the usual terminology. (What was particularly deplorable about this was that the lecturers, who were in a position of authority, did little about it, while us English people, though mostly deploring it, were also mostly too embarrassed to do anything more than shuffle up to make room for them on our benches and apologise for 'these people').

On the one occasion I tried to get the colonials into a rational debate on the subject, they claimed: "Blacks are all lazy and ignorant!" I said: "Starting with the latter, whose been in charge of their education for the last 30 or however many years?" Naturally, they had no rational reply to this sort of argument, and soon resorted to terms of abuse like: "Nigger lover!"

In short, they were sh*ts.