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is the same mentality behind the actions of the modern tolerati. The offense they deem offensive doesn’t have to be offensive as long as someone might construe it as offensive. Or rather, miscontrue.
    Misconstrued
should be the word that defines the modern era. So many things these days are misconstrued, only because the tolerati have blanketed our culture with the potential for taking everything the wrong way. Seriously, how weird do you feel now when you use the phrase “black market” in a sentence when there’s a black person nearby? Could it be that a black teen might not have heard that phrase before, and therefore would think you were being racist? Similar stuff has happened.
    As reported on the Dallas City Hall blog, back in July 2008, during a meeting concerning how to process Dallas Countytraffic ticket payments, Commissioner Kenneth Mayfield made a comment about how so much paperwork had been lost in the office. He said, to the horror of others in the meeting, that Central Collections “had become a black hole.” Mayfield is white, I should point out—only because Commissioner John Wiley Price, who is black, took it the wrong way. Or rather, misconstrued its meaning. He interrupted Mayfield with an “Excuse me!” and then added that the office had actually become a “white hole.” Indicating, more than anything else, that either (a) Price is incredibly thin-skinned and just begging to be outraged, and/or (b) he doesn’t actually know what a black hole is. This is the kind of guy who probably blames astrophysics itself for even having black holes. “Black holes? Proof the entire universe is racist!”
    You might think I made this whole thing up in my head as a joke, except you can Google it for yourself. And the incident didn’t end there. Judge Thomas Jones, who is black, also felt that this phrase “black hole” was deeply insensitive, and demanded an apology from Mayfield. Mayfield defended himself, saying the term was a scientific phrase and a figure of speech. Ironically, the judge seemed to be more bigoted than anyone, assuming no black person would have known what a black hole was. Thankfully, TV cameras caught all of this, and it made national news, and fodder for diminutive freaks like me.
    Now, one solution to all this is to have someone present at all times called a Misconstrued Umpire, who hits a buzzer whenever someone takes something the wrong way. One other option would be to never use the phrase “black hole,” and instead when you want to use it in a sentence, say something like, “Wow, Tom, your office has turned into the invisible remains of a collapsed star,with a powerful gravitational field in which nothing can ever escape.” Sort of like Al Gore.
    Or you could just lighten up.
    Crap, that’s racist—sorry about that.
    How about, “You could stop taking this crap so seriously.”
    This folly of misconstruance (I hope that’s a real word) reared its absurd head in the 2012 Summer Olympics, when NBC was forced to apologize over a poorly timed advertisement featuring a monkey doing gymnastics (promoting an upcoming new show about animals). The ad aired right after Gabby Douglas’s gold medal win. Douglas is black, so apparently someone believed that NBC had somehow planned all this, thinking, “Hey, let’s run this ad with a primate right after a black gymnast wins.” This is so idiotic, my fingers are actually vomiting as I type this.
    But if there’s anyone who is racist, it’s the person who registered the initial outrage. After all, if you made the link between a chimp on the rings and the delightful Gabby, aren’t you the actual racist? Wasn’t that thought in your head and not in NBC’s? NBC had no idea, but
you
did. Because no one in their right mind would go out of their way to do something like this. It was a gymnastics-themed ad that was placed among the gymnastics portion of the Olympics. No one thought it through further. Nor should they have.
    Yet it