There's always one...
Second hand tale. Mate of mine at Uni did languages. They had a lecturer who was a proper dodderer, come out of retirement or something but clearly way past it, with an over-the-top Rowley Birkin style posh voice, shaky hands etc. Meanwhile, one of the girls on his course was the most militant, most feminist, most anti-racist, and above and beyond all the very very blackest woman anyone had ever seen, the type to take loud offence at the slightest thing which could in way be interpreted as having any possible connection to race or colour.

So one day doddery old geezer is saying something about some technical point of translation, and my mate who's happy to be considered a bit of a smartarse sticks his hand up and picks him up on some technical point of grammar.

"Oh... oh... oh...", sputters our hero, realising with mild annoyance that my mate's right. "There's always one nigger in the woodpile, isn't there?" he says.

A second goes by while everyone else in the lecture theatre holds their breath, because they know Millie Tant is sitting RIGHT ON THE FRONT ROW, and they're bracing themselves. The old fella's brain updates him that it's not 1912 any more, and what comes out next as he smiles weakly and squints round the room is "I do hope we haven't got any.... Oh, I'm SO sorry." What followed was, I'm told, the worst and most drawn-out attempt at an apology in history, and everyone in the room being amazed that the normally brittle target of all this didn't say a thing, didn't complain at all in fact.
(SonofRojBlake, Fri 28 Oct 2011, 9:13, Reply)