PROVIDENCE R.I.
The longtime chairman of the Roger
Williams University
board admitted Monday that he had used the N-word during a board meeting,
saying it “kind of slipped out.”
“I apologized for that,” Ralph Papitto said in an
interview on WPRO-AM. “What else can I do? Kill myself?”
Papitto, 80, who stepped down this month after nearly 40
years on the board, admitted he used the racial slur at a May meeting of the
school’s board of trustees. He had been discussing the difficulty of finding
blacks and other minority members to serve on the 16-member board, which at the
time included 14 white men and two women.
Barbara Roberts, then a board member, said Papitto became
irate when he discussed pressures to make the board more diverse, at one point
using the slur to refer to black candidates.
She said he then told the board he knew he couldn’t say that
because of Don Imus, the radio host who was fired after referring to Rutgers
University women’s basketball team
members as “nappy-headed hos.”
“There was, like, this complete and utter silence, and
I was shocked beyond belief and very angry,” Roberts said.
