What a dumbass. This guy, Ralph Papitto, chairman of the board of Roger Williams University, upset over suggestions on how to diversify the board, refers to the black candidates for the position as “niggers.” OK, as a strategy for diversity, not his best effort. But that ain’t a pimple on the butt of his dumbassery. His explanation? A three pronged defense.
A) It just slipped out.
B) It is the first time I have ever used the word.
C) THE FIRST TIME I EVER HEARD IT WAS IN A RAP SONG!
That’s right. This 80 year old white American male had never even heard the word until he just happened to be, you know, chillin’ to some beats and the man on the mike drops the N-bomb.
So, not only is he an idiot, but the lies he’s chosen to tell to defend himself go a long, long way towards supporting the supposition that he thinks that the public is even stupider than he is.
Or he’s just an asshole trying to make a point about the double standard that occurs because the “N” word is commonly used by black artists who are popular and rewarded huge sums of money for saying the same thing.
What he doesn’t realize is that he needs a good back beat and some strong effect loops to really pull it off.
Did you read the article? Does this scenario seem even remotely likely? He chose a university board meeting of a small private school in Rhode Island to make this point?
“They took away my office, over words they had heard.
Gone is my career and my fame,
now they curse my name!
Even my dog died of shame…
The day… that I used… the N-word.” twang
Now sing about how your woman left you and you’re rotting in prison because you were set up by the sheriff for rustling those cattle even though you were busy beating up an umpire at your child’s little league game at the time.
This 80 year old white American male, founder of the Fortune 500 company Nortek in 1967, who started by founding Glass-Tite Industries, Inc. way back in 1956–this guy who has been in the thick of the American business community for the last 51 years, including during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s…
…had never heard the n-word before.
Until he heard it “on television or rap music or something.”
“I apologized for that,” Ralph Papitto said in an interview on WPRO-AM. “What else can I do? Kill myself?”
Considering how high tempers can run over this sort of incident, I’m not sure I’d be offering up suggestions of that sort.
I suppose it’s just my insatiable curiosity for the lurid, but I wish the article would reveal exactly what he said, rather than coyly hinting around about it:
"He had been discussing the difficulty of finding blacks and other minorities to serve on the 16-member board, which at the time included 14 white men and two women.
Barbara Roberts, then a board member, said Papitto became irate when he discussed pressures to make the board more diverse, at one point using the slur to refer to black candidates to the board."
