The label of bum is color/race neutral. It is certainly not a compliment, but not racist.
In high school I had a young and very attractive female English teacher who wore thin cotton blouses half way unbuttoned and no bra underneath.
I think it was perfectly appropriate, but I imagine others might disagree. None of the boys in the class, of course.
Lucky you. All my female teachers looked like the Sea Hag.
Dunno, I was a minor and perhaps I was sexually traumatized but didn’t realize it. 
You wouldn’t believe how bad the Taiwanese kids have it. The teachers here are pretty brutal. Lots of hard core drill sergeants. Most of the adults I teach say that they were hit on their hands, one hit for each point below the accepted limit, for each test. They push the kids too much and physically punish them or make them stand with their hands above their heads for not paying attention. Even little kids.
My stuff was trivial.
I had a psychology teacher in high school who would put on a film, turn off the lights and then go to sleep.
My Mormon biology teacher did the same, except he didn’t do a particularly good job of explaining evolution.
10th grade Social Studies teacher. If a girl came into class wearing a short skirt he’d say “Donna, get up on the desk! Let’s get a look at those legs!”
Good heavens! What year was that? Did they do so?
- Rural Ohio. No one ever took him up on it. Donna was a cheerleader and was the one most frequently called out. She did have nice legs!
We had “cloak rooms” too. I was a very shy and quiet child and one time in Grade 5 the teacher made me go into the cloak room, shut the door and yell until the kids at the front could hear me. Imagine my mortification every time the teacher said “Can you hear her, class?” and the class would go “Noooooo…”
All this accomplished was made me never want to speak in front of a class again. I told my dad what happened when I was a grown-up, and he asked why I never told him back then - he said he would have raised hell. Same deal though, I thought “what happens at school stays at school”. Early 1980s.
A 6th-grade teacher informed us that all Black guys, including our janitor, carry straight razors strapped to their ankles.
He was a rail-thin, kindly man with a face vertically wrinkled like a dried prune, and the evocative surname Ulsh, which I see is the Germanized of the Czech for “wolf.”
I think the point is that, while calling someone a bum isn’t racist per se, calling Martin Luther King a bum is racist. What most people know about Martin Luther King is entirely around his fight for racial equality. If you (as someone who knows him only from that) diss him, you’re not dissing him as an individual, you’re dissing his fight for racial equality - you’re saying that fighting for racial equality makes him a bum.
If the teacher had lived next door to King for years and decided he was a bum based on King throwing his leaves into the teacher’s garden and letting his dog bark all night, that wouldn’t be racist. But it doesn’t sound like that was the case.
If you wait long enough by the bank of the river, you will see the bodies of all your enemies come floating by.
A middle school teacher told us that the pilgrims landed in Salem, Oregon.
That could very well be the answer then. Apparently I was misinformed at some point so thanks for the correction.
Junior year of high school, world history class. The course progressed chronologically through history, so early in the year we dealt with the early history of mankind. The teacher decided it was appropriate to show us the uncut version of Quest For Fire - which, if you don’t remember, includes a graphic rape sequence. At some point near this sequence, he actually paused the video tape to speak about the sexual practices of time time, including something about “entry was typically from the rear,” and so on.
Later in the course we got to Catherine The Great. He made a point of mentioning (as fact) the urban legend about her being crushed to death while attempting to engage in bestiality with a bull.
That rule seems to insulate King from otherwise merited charges of being a bum – could I call him a bum if I’m picturing his many extramarital affairs?
I don’t agree that calling King a bum is per se racist.
When I was in school (1943-1956), the teacher is what you get, and you learn to deal with it, good bad or indifferent. There was no such thing then as political correctness, and corporal punishment was still de rigeur, and if the teach whipped you, your dad would likely do it again when you got home.
No doubt my teachers did everything in the book that they’d get fired for today. As Billy Joel put it, We lost a lot of fights but it taught us how to lose OK.
No kidding. Are you playing devil’s advocate to a fault for any particular reason?
We had a male and female teacher who regularly had sex in a closet attached to a classroom. She was a raging alcoholic who commented to a few male students about the size of the male teacher’s member and how she loved receiving anal sex from him. I don’t believe these trysts were ever discovered by the administration as she retired quite a few years later at an appropriate age.
The male teacher, however, was later involved in an after-hours school fire widely believed to be from him using the chemistry lab equipment to cook meth. Witnesses saw him fleeing the scene. Unbelievably, he was not fired for this but was transferred to another school in the district. I believe he was later charged with sexually harassing a female student but the case was dropped and he was reinstated as a teacher.
It wasn’t originally my story, it was TriPolar’s, so I don’t know the context and can’t really come up with much of an argument for whether that specific incident was racist or not. I was just explaining what I thought his point had been.
On the more general question: I think there would probably be nothing racist about considering King a bum for his extramarital affairs (I’m saying ‘probably’ because I can imagine people who would link those to his race). But if you want to call him a bum for those affairs, you might want to make your reasoning clear - because, again, those affairs aren’t the main reason King is well-known. He’s known primarily for his fight for racial equality. So if you call him a bum in a vacuum, people aren’t going to assume you’re talking about his affairs, or his personal hygiene, or his leaf-blowing habits; they’re going to assume you’re calling him a bum for his fight for civil rights.
Is not* that* racist?