i disagree. telling people that they shouldn't be offended by something clearly offensive and based upon an offensive stereotype is tantamount to telling black people that they cannot be victims of racism because it doesn't exist. I'm not even saying people can't be offended by this, just that expressions of outrage aren't useful on this, especially when they aren't genuine. Let's face it, when you are threatening violence against large numbers of people for wearing offensive t-shirts, you are putting on an act or you are imbalanced. Every time something offensive (though not always consequential) happens, people feel a need to take their reaction to extremes to demonstrate how much they are offended. When the story about the Yale art student hit, people wished she would be barren. Everytime some perverted criminal commits a horrendous act, people talk about sending him to jail to be repeatedly anally raped. This acting is not helpful. There is still damaging racism in our society. If you want to combat it, do that instead of making a big deal over an idiotic but ultimately unimportant racist t-shirt. i didn't say anything about people being offended to the point of violence. i didn't know that that was the case. in the case of threats of violence, i'd say those people are much more likely to be unbalanced than faking. you simply cannot tell people that they aren't offended by something. I'm not so much saying that people aren't offended as I am saying that their being offended is partly a result of feeling expected to be offended, and offended in a grand way. Threatening violence is sometimes just a way to up the ante and prove how offended you really are. And sometimes it is just a bad joke. I think people can genuinely be offended by this. It certainly is stupid. But expectations muddy the waters and blow inconsequential issues out of proportion, making it harder to talk reasonably about more consequential unspoken problems. Hence, the outrage over t-shirts not being useful. I don't know, this train of thought has gotten away from me. I'm sorry for the pile-on, but I agree with Sully. There is just no way you should feel qualified to decide this for someone else. And Snood was right, as well. A violent, over-the-top reaction to racism is MUCH better than ignorance of it or even complacency in the face of it. I'm in agreement. I don't understand why there needs to be a some kind of line when we are and aren't offended by racism. These shirts were totally out of line and more than just vaguely or slightly racist. Why is this any less signifigant than anything else?