Why is it okay to tell jokes about "rednecks", fat people and white males? Why are there still jokes about Irish drunks and Italian thugs? If I posted something (tongue firmly planted in cheek) about black people and watermelons or fried chicken, I'd be vilified, probably blacklisted. The same with a Puerto Rican/Mexican joke with laziness as its root. Yet, the forums here are full of ethnic jokes. I suppose it's just a matter of your ethnicity. It's perfectly okay to put down anyone who doesn't fall into the spectrum of "disadvantaged". I know a hell of a lot of white people who can't feed themselves for a week, not through any laziness or loss of their own; my family lived in the US for 300+ years, and not one of us is a college graduate. We worked the farms and mills, living hand-to-mouth. From 1800-1920, only half the children to whom our females gave birth lived past the age of one. They had seven kids because three of them would die. We didn't have an education and knew our parents couldn't provide one; we did have books. We're all very well-read and self-educated and can't get jobs because we don't have that piece of paper. Apparently, no one minded helping waste our minds. Now, I've moved to New Zealand to make a bette r life. Ha! It's the same thing here. If you are at least 1/16 Maori, there's a free university education for you. If not, you're on your own. And the pakeha parents here are no better off than my parents were. The government keeps complaining about the number of Asian students at the local universities; maybe they should make it easier for pakeha. The government of New Zealand uses "pakeha" as a denominator of race on its forms, no worries that "pakeha" is Maori for "stranger". Who in their right mind would check that box? In government translation, it means white. Personally, I tick "other" and write in "human". Everyone just needs to get a grip and treat each other on an individual basis. I thought, when I moved here, that NZ government did that. How wrong I was!