Can you elaborate, if I'm not intruding, Squinney? I don't quite get the meaning behind their exchange.
The customer was saying he would ignore the African American guy that was supposed to be his salesperson, and would choose the African guy when he was ready to buy due to them both being from Africa.
The customer may have felt he could better trust the African. We are on commission, so he would also be financially benefitting the African salesperson, and also financially punishing the African American salesperson that was supposed to take care of his purchase.
Did the customer discriminate?
(If I cared, I might have been bothered by the "white girls" comment. More the "girls" than the "white.")
That appears to have been a case of tribalism, though, rather than racism. That sort of thing was very common in Ireland when i briefly lived there. If you moved in a certain circle, had a certain set of friends, you were expected to do your shopping at specific shops, and to partronize only certain pubs and chippers. In general, i was excused my lack of tribal aherence because i was merely American, and considered hopelessly ignorant.
Tribalism works on all sorts of levels, some as low as despising those who live in the next block, simply because they don't live on your street.
I feel blessed that people can't tell what race I am. I avoid the whole thing.
Re: I Was Invisible, Except for My White Skin
Bella Dea wrote:I am pretty sure someone is going to come a long and rip me a new one for starting this thread but dammit, I deserve to be heard just like anyone else.
As a white female, I experienced racial discrimination this weekend. Not a huge, blow out offense. Just a small almost subtle one.
But it sucked.
I wasn't hurt by it but I was offended at the ignorance of the person who did it.
I was downtown Detroit, sitting between two black women. The one woman needed to get up to use the bathroom or something and so she turned and said "Can you watch my seat?" but instead of asking me, who was right next to her, she was shouting it to the other black woman who was on the other side of me. Just as though I wasn't there. I truly felt invisible. And untrusted. Like I'd steal her machine or something.
They clearly didn't know each other so don't say that maybe they were friends or whatever.
I couldn't believe it. At first I was pissed but then got to thinking, "So, this is what it feels like..." and to be honest, I think it will make me think twice the next time I feel a prejudice against someone based on their looks, be it skin color or weight or whatever.
It makes me sad to know that the people who cry "racist" at me (which is the case here in many parts of Detroit) are the ones who are racist.
Why can't we just all get along? In all seriousness, what is the big freakin' deal with people just letting people be people, regardless of what color you are?
It just opened my eyes as to how far we haven't come when it comes to racism. What a sad day....
Aaaaw, the poor little white girl got her feelings hurt. Alert the media!
Amigo wrote:I feel blessed that people can't tell what race I am. I avoid the whole thing.
You don't fool me none, i know yer a Beaner
and a Paddy, even if don't nobody else know about it . . .
I'm quickly becoming Italian. Capeesh.
You misspelled capiche . . .
Sometimes I feel like I am part everybody. The book I'm reading now is centered on the Balkans and the area now Turkey from 1882 or so to where I am now, about 1912.
Louis de Bernieres' "Birds Without Wings" - He wrote Captain Corelli's Mandolin. I've no idea how historically accurate he is, but by page 239 I am in the minds of so many people of diverse ethnic and religious heritage. One of the characters is Ataturk, Mustafa Kemal, who was primary in the development of a secular Turkey. Set no doubt knows more about that than I do. My point is about empathy, one lives more lives if one has or gets some of it.
ossobuco wrote:Sometimes I feel like I am part everybody. The book I'm reading now is centered on the Balkans and the area now Turkey from 1882 or so to where I am now, about 1912.
Louis de Bernieres' "Birds Without Wings" - He wrote Captain Corelli's Mandolin. I've no idea how historically accurate he is, but by page 239 I am in the minds of so many people of diverse ethnic and religious heritage. One of the characters is Ataturk, Mustafa Kemal, who was primary in the development of a secular Turkey. Set no doubt knows more about that than I do. My point is about empathy, one lives more lives if one has or gets some of it.
We are part everybody. To my grave I will live no other way.
I saw some of a doco recently called "The Race Myth", may or may not have been based on a book of the same name.
They claimed (as I understood it) that race is mostly a social construct since genetically, there is no one gene exclusively shared by all members of a race, and no human gene absent from all members of any one race.
Like Phoenix, I find myself fighting the urge to indulge in compensatory anti-racist forms of racism...I'm very unsure about what is the "right" thing to do, and I doubt there's a simple answer.
One thing I am sure about, racism that is perpetrated by members of an outcast minority on members of the ruling majority is still racism. To defend it as "bonds of brotherhood" and other such rhetoric makes no difference.
Good thought, Eori. It is the case that both majority and minority group bigotry are wrong-headed.
Yes on that, Amigo and JL.
Dlowan, a good book? depends on one's criterion. For me it is. I learned a lot from the Mandolin book as well. Expanded my world some more.
ossobuco wrote:Yes on that, Amigo and JL.
Dlowan, a good book? depends on one's criterion. For me it is. I learned a lot from the Mandolin book as well. Expanded my world some more.
I almost feel like it is time to circle the wagons. That everything that can be done has been done.
I think maybe the opposite, that wagons need to just open up.
On the other hand, amigo, my father missed my birth for a union meeting.
That's a shame, Osso. But what better reason could he have had?
