I used to live in New Orleans, majority black city, and some of the blacks are (quite rightly) resentful of The System. One day I was walking in a public park, saw a little black boy of seven or eight bullying somebody and told him to stop it. (I come from a Russian family. Russians are always doing stuff like that, so I guess it's genetic.) Well, his mother came striding up and got in my face immediately with a whole series of racial remarks about how I was mistreating her kid. I could just see the headlines: RACE RIOT CAUSED BY WHITE BUSYBODY. I managed to get her--not calmed down exactly, but at least she left me alone. Now the point (there is a point to all this) is that I lived in New Orleans for 13 years and that was the only time something like that happened. The same probably goes for you, Tom. You deal with hundreds of people. You get this sort of thing maybe once in a thousand times? (Unless you're keeping a stiff upper lip about all the other occurrences.) To me, it's amazing how well most people handle being badly treated, day in and day out. You're dealing with an infuriating racial slur once in a rare while. For them it's probably a daily or weekly occurrence, and yet, almost all them manage to stop from taking it out on every white in the area. It's a shame that some don't, especially to someone who's doing nothing but helping.