<p>Ifax,</p>
<p>I don’t even know where to start. Hmm.</p>
<p>Let’s see - I’m a middle aged African American woman whose physician husband was once told in a grocery store that he couldn’t write a check over $99. In front of my children. With $300 in groceries in the basket - in a store we’d shopped at for years. It was a new night manager. My husband walked out and the next day I stormed in and demanded to talk to the store manager – who made excuses but became embarrassed when half the staff and a number of customers recognized my husband as their physician and started to give him shout-outs as he walked by. Needless to say we demanded the store reshop my grocery list (I faxed it) and then call my husband and children in for an apology. We donated the proceeds to Harvesters.</p>
<p>Two weeks later, I watched - with humor - as a KMart manager flirted with the white woman in front of me then helped her arrange her layaway, but then told me I couldn’t write a check without proof of residence - a utility bill. The driver’s license (current) business cards (I was a manager at a major corporation), a Gold Amex and all my other ID didn’t count. After some prodding he signed off on my purchase and told me not to come back without a “utility” bill. I don’t like complaining to low level people, so I wrote the board of directors and attached a local news article about my family shot at our house as our “proof of address.” I got an apology and a local charity got a nice donation at my request.</p>
<p>I tell you that because I’m always fascinated when people state * “I’m white” * and * “here’s how I think it should work for everyone else” * in an environment already stacked in their favor just because he/she or some random family member has peripheral contact with a culture seen mostly from outside.</p>
<p>The purpose of Affirmative Action (which frankly is a dead concept since the Bush Administration) was to correct a longstanding - and still ever present habit - of qualified people getting pushed to the side in favor of lesser qualified white applicants. Even then, most minorities hated it because those who were well qualified were tagged as unqualified charity cases.</p>
<p>I remember my former employer putting together a “diversity” committee headed by a rich white male whose son attended the same private school as my daughters. Said “son” routinely came to school on a daily basis and made racist comments. The executive was subsequently interviewed for a school recruitment video in which he said the advantage of diversity is so he children can see that “not all children are like us, or meant to be like us.” A Jewish woman saw the video and told me to ask for it. It took a week to pry it out of their hands and even then they asked if “so and so” had told me about it. See - she was the only Jewish person at the school and they were hoping to pull in more. So they deduced she spilled the beans. I then shared the video with the only Black board member - a prominent lawyer - who pulled his children out of the school and told us to do the same one year later after failing to “fix” the problem. (We were both full-pays with more than one child at the school so I’m sure it hurt them) </p>
<p>So – it’s great to have opinions. But your attitude is precisely why there are systems in place to counteract them. You don’t know what is going on in our day to day lives. I especially take umbrage with your idea that all those “other” groups don’t deserve to be in the Black/White argument. Tell that to the Japanese descendents held in camps here in the US. Or the Chinese treated like slaves. Or any Latino kid who is called slurs and assumed to be an illegal resident.</p>
<p>The point we’re trying to make is you don’t get a vote on how OTHER people should be dealing with what has become their day to day reality.</p>
<p>Please Google the controversy when Roger Ebert weighed in his opinion on the difference between the “N” word and “slave” and which he’d rather be called. TO which there was a firestorm from people informing him he didn’t get an opinion because he’d never be called either. He responded - “You’re right. I should have just shut the “F” up!”</p>
<p>(sorry to the others for being impolite, but good grief - my daughter and many of her ethnic friends expend a lot of unnecessary energy trying to deflect BS from kids like this when they are trying to just be normal kids)</p>
<p>The tell - when I sat with a young lady and her parents at a recent event. The parents invited my daughter to their “summer home.” We invited their daughter to our home in reciprocity. We live in a very large metropolitan city. The girl exclaimed “I’m so excited. I’ve never been to a small town before.”</p>
<p>Walk in our shoes, sweetie, then tell me if you’d like to trade. In the meantime - the diversity events aren’t there to make “those” kids more comfortable. They’re made necessary to educate kids like you who think limited outsider knowledge and a few hours of shows on BET has made them an instant expert in all things related to people of color.</p>
sorry if this sounded mean/racist, that wasn’t my intention at all. i’m genuinely curious.</p>