Pamela Ramsey Taylor, right, with her offensive message and subsequent apology: she also published thanks for the heartening support she has received
Here is a teaser: how can you call a black woman an "ape in heels" and not have racist intent?
Actually, to be wholly accurate, the phrase used by Pamela Ramsey Taylor, while still employed as the Clay County Development Corporation director in West Virginia, was "a Ape in heels". Her English-as-a-mature-student course has not yet reached the correct use of upper case letters and the indefinite article.
She no longer holds that position. And her friend and fellow non-racist Beverley Whaling, who responded with the grotesque message, "Just made my day, Pam", is no longer the local mayor.
I suppose the removal of one from office, and the pressure that led to the other's resignation, may be taken as an encouraging sign that even in a backwater of the USA that voted in large numbers for a man who traded throughout the campaign on the abuse of minorities, decency sometimes forces itself to be heard.
From Everipedia: 'I was referring to my day being made for change in the White House!' protested Ms Whaling. 'I am truly sorry for any hard feeling this may have caused! Those who know me know that I’m not in any way racist!'
Looking at Ms Taylor's posting, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that here is an open-and-shut case of a woman given to vile racist rhetoric.
But I invite you to read her subsequent apologia and make up your own minds.
Is it possible she merely chose a crassly inappropriate phrase and, as a model of all-American beauty and grace, meant only to call the outgoing president's wife ugly, as she implies?
Or was she caught out, fairly and squarely, in her own prejudices? I suppose stupidity comes into play whichever explanation is actually true, unless she is a considered racist as charged and thought she would get away with it in the dark new disUnited States of America.
As for the lady mayor, she has gone too, bleating all the while that anyone who knows her recognises she is not a racist blah blah blah.
Perhaps Trump's great pal Nigel Farage can explain where people holding similar views would fit into his hideous post-Brexit Britain.
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