If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
From the Dallas City Hall Blog on the Dallas Morning News website:
County commissioners were discussing problems with the central collections office that is used to process traffic ticket payments and handle other paperwork normally done by the JP Courts.
Commissioner Kenneth Mayfield, who is white, said it seemed that central collections “has become a black hole” because paperwork reportedly has become lost in the office.
Commissioner John Wiley Price, who is black, interrupted him with a loud “Excuse me!” He then corrected his colleague, saying the office has become a “white hole.”
That prompted Judge Thomas Jones, who is black, to demand an apology from Mayfield for his racially insensitive analogy.
Mayfield shot back that it was a figure of speech and a science term. A black hole, according to Webster’s, is perhaps “the invisible remains of a collapsed star, with an intense gravitational field from which neither light nor matter can escape.”
Other county officials quickly interceded to break it up and get the meeting back on track. TV news cameras were rolling, after all.
I’d love to see the video of this. What I find to be hysterically funny about this is that even though commissioner Mayfield wasn’t being the least bit racially degrading when he used the term black hole, commissioner Price (seen here letting his hair down) was being racially insulting when he responded to the imaginary slur with the term “white hole”.
At least he was trying to be which makes it extremely funny.
If I wasn’t such a cheapskate, I would send commissioner John Wiley Price and Judge Thomas Jones copies of Stephen Hawking’s landmark book, A Brief History in Time. I was looking around Borders yesterday and happened to find an updated, re-written version of the book entitled A Briefer History of Time. I was published in 2005 by Hawking and American physicist Leonard Mlodinow.
