At a recent meeting of city officials in Dallas County, Texas, county commissioners were hashing out difficulties with the way traffic tickets are handled. Commissioner Kenneth Mayfield observed that the bureaucracy "has become a black hole" for lost paperwork and for this he was immediately pounced upon by fellow commissioner John Price, who is black and whose education is sadly deficient in the rudiments of scientific terminology.
According to the Dallas Morning News' City Hall Blog, Price took umbrage shouting, "Excuse me! That office has become a white hole."
Seizing on the opportunity to also be offended, Judge Thomas Jones demanded that Mayfield apologize for the "racially insensitive analogy".
The problem obviously is that none of the aggrieved has any idea what a black hole is or why it's called that. Since Mayfield used the word "black" in connection with the bureaucracy his African American colleagues simple-mindedly assumed he was making an offensive racial reference.
The episode reminds me of the incident in Washington, D.C. a couple of years ago when a white councilman lost his job for correctly applying the word "niggardly". None of the people who demanded his ouster for this outrage were familiar enough with the workings of a dictionary to actually look the word up.
It might not have mattered if they did, of course, since they might well have looked up the wrong word.
It's embarrassing enough that politically correct illiterates like these are in positions of public responsibility, but it's unconscionable that they have the power to make life miserable for more intelligent colleagues.
RLC