New Brunswick, N.J., spring 1984. I was in a bar during an open-mike stand-up show. A white Rutgers student got onstage and opened with, "What do you call 100,000 black people at the bottom of the ocean? A good start."
She didn't see me; I was over in a dark corner.
I should note, for the sake of history, that the joke got only a slight and uncomfortable laugh out of the otherwise all-white (or close to it) crowd. Yet the fact that the girl told the joke at all showed that this was a transitional period. No one yelled, "Racist!" or wrote the girl up in a campus-newspaper editorial the next day. CONTINUE....
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