"We don't need no education...no dark sarcasm in the classroom...all in all, it's just another brick in the wall..." -- Pink Floyd

I'm freshly back home, after an unexpected cross-country trip with long stretches of road in which the only AM radio choices were rebroadcasting the same four talk radio dittoheads.

And what should greet me, but the whole Brian Emanuels episode? Normally, the words "racism" and "Seattle schools" in the same sentence, especially in this publication, mean that blacks are getting screwed. And they are. But Emanuels' fate is, in that context, a person bites dog story, a genuine case of white guy getting screwed.

Especially after the training I got listening to 16 Clear Channel stations while driving through Southern Idaho, I should be sputtering outraged indignities about the PC Police. And I'm a member.

So allow me.

Emanuels, in case you're not up on your local Jerry Springeresque school district dramas, is the white former Cleveland High School teacher who resigned after his use of the word "nigger" on the job last month raised such a stink that new local NAACP leader Carl Mack, among others, went public calling for his head. Emanuels gave it to them before the school district had a chance to.

The case pushes my buttons for a number of reasons. For one, I'm a white guy who works with words for a living. As a kid, I was dumped into a private, all-white South Carolina "academy" founded specifically to avoid desegregation. I've spent most of my adult life working, in one context or another, on political issues that involve combatting white supremacism (a clearer, less ambiguous term than "racism.") For over a decade, most of it spent in the South, I was the white guy in an interracial relationship. Now, I live and work in a Central District neighborhood where 85% of the people Isee each day are black.

I also care a lot about education. My current beloved (for nine years now) teaches. I speak at schools frequently. For the last two years, I've also been on the advisory board of the student newspaper at my neighborhood high school, Garfield. This just as easily could have happened there.

I also happen to have grown up gay, the other component of Emanuels' linguistic nightmare.

I also just used the word "nigger" while writing a political essay, which is what I do for a living.

And the pillorying of Brian Emanuels sucks. Big time. It's ridiculous, for the same reasons it would be ridiculous if I were fired for what I just wrote. And Carl Mack -- a guy I admire, a man who has come into the local NAACP leadership post this year vowing to make it more radical and relevant -- should know better.

Some languages have a grammatical structure in which the meaning or conjugation of a word changes depending on who's using it and who the audience is. Ours is not one. "Nigger" has become a rare word in the English language. What other word parallels its usage? One speaker (a black guy) can use it in referring to a friend, and it's casual slang; coming from a white guy to the same person, it's a deadly insult.

As it happens, Emanuels' student uttered one of the only other words out there: "gay." The critical context, missing from both the howls of outrage of Mack and other and from most media accounts, was that Emanuels did not call his African-American student a nigger. He used the word in exactly the same context that his student did when the boy referred derisively to an assignment as being "gay," slang for (roughly) weak, effeminate, unworthy. Intentionately or not, the kid was using a word as a slur that I can use and have used freely to describe myself, as I did a few lines above. Emanuels found exactly the right linguistic comparison by asking, to the kid and then to the class, how the boy would feel if Emanuels, as a white, called him a nigger, and explaining that the youth had used "gay" in a way that was wounding and offensive to queers, just like the use of "nigger" would be had Emanuels used it to describe the kid.

In other words, Emanuels got pilloried as either (at worst) a true racist, or (at best) unaware of the very lesson he was sharing with his charges.

So after the class, kids complained, parents squawked, community leaders thundered. And now Emanuels -- a retired Microsoftie who went into teaching this year for all the right reasons, the type of teacher our schools desperately need, is now out of teaching. He made, essentially, a rookie mistake: misjudging, in a racially mixed inner-city high school, his freedom to speak freely as a white guy about a topic never far from anyone's minds.

Emanuels should have been reprimanded for his poor judgment in not knowing that even uttering the n-word would be used against him in the way that kids are always looking for a leg up on an authority figure. He could have, and would have, learned from it. Instead, a horde of what some talk radio demagogues might call professional victims descended, ferreting out bigotry where none was shown.

Instead, the lesson -- for every white teacher and community member, and not a few blacks as well -- is that in a school district and city with far more racially based problems than most whites care to admit, race is a topic that must never be broached. Only bad things happen when publicly verbalizing what everyone says or thinks privately. Forget an honest discussion; when a mistake is made, when a grievance is aired, no listening is possible. No learning is possible.

Most of our kids grow up knowing better; most students in Seattle are more colorblind than the adults around them. Race has virtually no biological basis; everyone's DNA is pretty much the same. Race is a social construct.

And now, instead of teaching, Brian Emanuels is another brick in that wall.