I see that Earl Butz is dead at 98 (link). I remember him as the guy who got sideways for a vulgar joke but I had forgotten: he actually got sideways for two vulgar jokes but the first did not get him fired. You can find details (with elision) at Wiki (link). Tim Noah puts it elegantly (link), declaring that Butz "portrayed black men as lazy, shiftless, and priapic."
Noah does an unobjectionable job of sketching the racist content and context of the remark and the evolution thereof, but I have often wondered--what if Butz had said it not about blacks, but about men? Would he have been forced to resign? Would he have been wrong?
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