LOL nice one Sancho

"Anybody who uses a term like "negro" in this day and age and doesn't know that it's offensive is obviously racist."

c.j., it's not obvious to me. ignorant, yes? racist, definitely not obvious. and the evidence of the dickie case suggests otherwise. it's certainly not a purely logical conclusion. that is, unless you're using "racism" in a totally trivial manner, such as "notices the race of".

in any case, i think your term "banal" is right, whether you intended it with the connotations i think of or not. there's plenty of non-banal racism around: can't we focus on that?

Maybe Ms Van Laambert believed the term "negro" was acceptable because it is routinely used by African Americans in Hollywood films.

As much as racism should be abhored, I think sometimes the term 'racist' can be bandied about a bit much which diminishes racism for those who experience it.

Over time, terms that we considered appropriate change and indeed connotations vary between cultures. Negro was once an acceptable term even if it is not much used today. Most people now say African or African-American.

The television is replaying some old skits at the moment on Bert Newton's faux pas when he stood with Muhammed Ali and said "I like the boy" to Ali's chagrin. To Australians this phrase is endearing but to an African-American would be seen as demeaning - a throwback to slave days when "boy" was a derogatory term for a grown adult male slave.

It has to be taken in context. None of us know the intentions of the accused in the case other than herself. Even the victim may have misread the intent in this case due to past experiences with racism which is quite understandable.

Or the accused intended to be insulting. Who of us can really know without knowing the people involved or having been present at the verbal exchange.

OXFORD DICTIONARY - NEGRO> MEMBER OF BLACK-SKINNED AFRICAN RACE

I can assure you that white Australians regard Marcia Hindes with the same respect and admiration that they have for Kathy Freeman, I have never heard any one of my acquaintance or in my family ever speak of these two ladies with anything but admiration and respect. In fact we have music CDs of Marcia Hindes sitting on the shelf behind me as I type this.

It really is a cultural thing I think. We Australians have never grown up hearing black Africans referred to as Black Africans except in recent times and so the name Negro is just a name that we are more familiar with. It is almost second hand in Australia as we only ever heard it in movies and usually those movies depicted the injustice to the slaves and we felt sympathy for them. The word Negro has never had the same raw emotive hostility in Australia as it had between the blacks and whites in America. Modern white Australians don't even associate the word with any meaning other than depicting black, white,etc

The issue has a lot to do about context. The article simply states the accusation and the tribunal result, and all the supplementary contextual information has been excluded.

A Colleague from South Africa when asked said that there were many racial epithets of which Negro was not one. He had heard it used, but more in context of Caucasian/ Negro /Asian etc.

The tribunals are made up of mostly ANC appointees who are unlikely to be tolerant to racial abuse, the fact that they have found no fault says more than the author's uninformed opinion.

The author though well meaning has used her own personal experiences to draw conclusions in a situation about which she has little to no understanding, and as the saying goes: "Garbage in, garbage out."