Quote:
Originally posted by darling1
i was watching c-span one night and a well-known author and washington insider (i forget her name) told a story. she mentioned that she was in a particular building in the south to do an interview and she overheard 2 maids talking. one maid said to the other "isn't that so and so?" the other maid replied with an attitude, "yeah, that's her. she thinks she something special!"
well ms. so and so approached the 2 women and said to the mean one, "excuse me, but i overheard you speaking about me and i just wanted to tell you know that you better hope that i am something special." she walked away an went on to her interview.
i think that is really how we should approach folks who want to be devisive in their comments. address it, brush them off and keep on stepping. eventually somebody will get the memo.
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See and I think the author (and the maids) would have been better served if she had responded "excuse me, but I overheard you speaking about me and I just wanted to tell you that you should think you are something special too!"
I think the maid's response came from insecurity (how could someone be so confident? How can someone
not be beaten down by life?) while the authors comment was a "I got you told!", even if it didn't come with the head roll and finger snap and served to confirm what the maids were thinking. Sometimes I think if we know better we have to do better.
If the truth be told a whole lotta upper echelon (sp?) Black folks refuse to make eye contact with the folks low on the totem pole when passing them in the hall and only talk to their white colleagues. I'm not saying that if you are the VP of Marketing you need to hang out in the mail room, but what's wrong with saying "Hello" to people and not walking by them like your stuff don't stank?
Plus, a lot of times we do change when we are exposed to other things. For instance, I used to eat pigs feet growing up. Now, one look at them and I get sick to my stomach. A relative I was visiting offered me some one time and I politely declined. She responded "What, you too good for pig feet now?" While I could have gone into a disertation about the lack of nutritional value of pig feet, I knew underlying her comment was a perceived rejection of her and her lifestyle. She was really saying, I think, "Are you too good for me?"
Just a different spin on it....I think it is too easy (not saying you did this darling1) to dismiss the maids in the above story and others like them as mere haters with out determining what made them that way.