Discussion Question (Worth 25 Points Toward Your Final Grade.)

Over at Pandagon, Pam received a letter from a reader asking for advice regarding a recent situation at her synagogue that made her uncomfortable. It was during Purim, which, in case you aren't familiar with this holiday, is a pretty silly celebration, with booze and costumes and noisemakers, and kids tend to get a little nutty during services, and everybody generally has a good time. As you can see from reading the letter, people's ideas of silly fun can differ.

If you clicked the link, you will see that some attendees thought it would be funny to show up dressed in blackface. The reader found this to be in questionable taste, to say the least, and actually went so far as to discuss her feelings with one of the offenders. Of course, this did not go over very well, and she wrote to Pam for advice on how she should have handled it. After Pam gave the reader her usual well-measured response, she opened the floor for a discussion on how Pandagon readers would handle themselves if they were in a similar situation.

Typically, this is the kind of situation I would mull over forever, mostly because I strongly suspect Stuff White People Like was written about me. Written about me, and I did not get a 350k book deal out of it. Where is the fairness in that, I ask you?

I don't have to wonder anymore, however, because I know exactly how I would have handled it, as I just had my mettle tested a few weeks ago on this very subject.

A coworker and I were discussing a subject much loved to all who work in customer service: People we hate talking to. Since we are a group of people who flinch every time the phone rings, the list is pretty long.

We had been covering the segment on people who do not speak a word of English. Since our jobs depend on our ability to make ourselves clear, these conversations are very stressful for us, because these people are paying for $5000 worth of furniture and of course want to know when it is going to show up at their homes, and we can't tell them. It's generally an unpleasant time, when you know both parties are going to hang up the phone, bury their faces in their hands, and mutter "Oh no," because the ball has started to roll forward, and we have no idea when or where it's going to roll to a stop. The customer can't even call us back to cancel the order, because we won't understand that, either, and will probably end up charging them for an extra vase or something.

This doesn't happen with all languages, of course. Do you speak Spanish? Urdu? Russian? Hindi? Arabic? Hebrew? Big Machine can help you! And I can probably speak French to you, if you can handle speaking at a Kindergarten level for two or so minutes. But nobody in the department speaks any Asian language besides Hindi, so when we get these calls we always get frustrated and upset at our total inability to help the customer in any way. In other situations, we could put the customer on hold, run over to Pavarti's desk, tell her there's a Hindi speaker on the phone, and ask her if she could come over to our desk and take the call for us. When this happens, everybody is happy. But when there is no Korean speaker on staff, nobody is happy. Not the customer, not us, nobody.

So this is what we were shooting the breeze about, the fear that the customer's furniture will arrive and we will not have been able to communicate when the delivery day was supposed to be and consequently the customer will not be home, or they ordered a table made of unfinished wood and they have four children that love purple grape juice, and we couldn't tell them they were making a mistake by selecting that piece for their dinner table, or any number of horrors that can occur when their order and delivery are not discussed at all.

And as we were wrapping up the discussion, getting ready to go back to work, my coworker said, quite pleasantly, in the same cocktail party tone of voice we'd been using, "You know, I really don't care for them as a race."

Not sure I was fully understanding what she was saying, I stammered a little bit, then said, "...you mean, you find the language barrier frustrating?"

But no, she refused to take the out I gave her, and said, still quite clearly and pleasantly, "No, I mean I don't like Asians. Generally. As a race."

I couldn't think of a single thing to say in response to this. I just stared at her, all "What the hell was that?" like Stan in South Park when Cartman suddenly morphed into Al Jolsen while under alien control.



I stood there, open-mouthed, for a couple of seconds, then said abruptly, "Uh...BYE!" and walked as fast as I could across the office back to my desk. Where I sat and laughed hysterically for ten minutes, and for several more minutes over the next three days.

"I really don't care for them as a race?"

Who says that? Why? Why would anybody say that to someone they barely know? I couldn't believe it. For the next week, I was working it into every conversation I possibly could.

At dinner:

Steve: Do you want some potatoes?

Me: You know, I really don't care for them as a race.

At bedtime:

Steve: Are you still reading Harry Potter to Alex?

Me: You know, I really don't care for wizards, as a race.

In fact, I'm sitting here, still laughing, because I still can't really believe I heard what I heard.

So now I can only conclude that if someone showed up to my Temple dressed in blackface, I may very well have just fallen over laughing in disbelief that these people actually exist.*

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*Of course, I have been known to laugh hysterically at completely inappropriate times. Long time readers may remember I had a similar reaction when my ex-boyfriend and I discovered a dead body in a refrigerator.