University Board Chair Apologizes for Using "N" Word During Board Meeting

Parents Forum
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<p>I probably should have said, “admits,” not “apologizes.” I don’t know if what he said qualified as an apology.</p>

<p>Imagine what he says when he’s really behind closed doors…</p>

<p>"PROVIDENCE, Rhode Island (AP) – The longtime chairman of the Roger Williams University board admitted Monday to using the N-word during a board meeting, saying it “kind of slipped out.”</p>

<p>“I apologized for that,” Ralph Papitto said in an interview on WPRO-AM. “What else can I do? Kill myself?”</p>

<p>Papitto, 80, who stepped down earlier this month after nearly 40 years on the board, admitted he had used the racial slur at a May meeting of the school’s board of trustees.</p>

<p>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.</p>

<p>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."</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/07/16/racial.slur.ap/index.html[/url]”>http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/07/16/racial.slur.ap/index.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

2

<p>Roger Williams is one of my Historical heros and founded RI as a colony based upon tolerance acceptance of respect of people’s differences. The guy’s "apology sounds more like something I’d here in my HS classroom than from a man in his 80s. Roger Williams would be as disgusted as I am.</p>

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<p>I wish everyone would stop using the N word. Yound black people use this term to greet one another and young white people who emulate them also use this word in the same way.</p>