Confront Accuser, Demand Proof

Dear Miss Manners: What is a racist? How does one respond when charged with racism?

Is there a defense, or is it like medieval witchcraft? If you float you’re a witch? If you drown, you might have been innocent, but at least you’re not a problem any more.

The people who make these accusations have no interest in my fate, but the question being raised, even without evidence, jeopardizes my career.

Can you help? I consider myself a fair person, but I’m truly disturbed and feel completely defenseless.

Gentle Reader: Miss Manners can only imagine the agonizing situation that prompts you to ask such a question. Obviously, she is in no position to judge the charge that was made.

But she has noticed that some people now make such charges almost casually, without taking the full responsibility of staining someone’s honor.

Accusing someone of being a racist - or of being a liar or a thief - is so serious that it is only excusable when the accuser is prepared to offer firm evidence to substantiate the charge.

However the charge is made, it must be taken seriously by the accused. The defense is to express outrage, to make a counter-accusation that one has been slandered, and to demand that the evidence be aired in front of whoever has heard the accusation.

Miss Manners is sorry to incite you to confrontation. But traditionally, the act of swallowing an insult has been considered tantamount to admitting that it is true.

Dear Miss Manners: Due to new employment plus more social life, my daughter has less spare time. So now she sends the same computer printout-type letter to all of her relatives and friends.

She and I had mail corresponded for about 25 years. Our one-on-one question and answer letters are history, and so is our feeling of closeness.

Frankly, those form-type letters are a turn-off for me. I couldn’t care less about people’s social or material status. Only about feelings, health, relationships, etc., one on one. How do you rate the new future wave of corresponding, etiquette-wise?

Gentle Reader: Surprisingly highly.

But, if you ask Miss Manners how she rates daughters who, busy or not, downgrade their relationships with their mothers, the rating is not so high.

The computer offers a marvelous way of mass-mailing bits of news, jokes and other such delights to several people at once. But to keep the thing polite, Miss Manners requires one of the first two following procedures, plus the third:

1. Write individual letters, in which the paragraphs that would interest more than one recipient are embedded in letters that are, or at least appear to be, custom tailored to them. This takes a bit more effort than keying in “Dear” at the top with a space for a name. The test is whether the person who gets it can detect that it is a mass mailing.

2. Frankly label the contribution as a widely distributed note, presumably of interest to a number of people. At best, such a communication can only be considered a supplement to whatever correspondence is appropriate.

3. Refrain from using it in place of required correspondence, such as personal letters to your mother.

xxxx