Last week Charlotte Observer writer Gail Smith-Arrants wrote a story about SouthPark mall becoming more and more upscale, and quoted a writer who suggested that attitudes there were changing for the worst. Naturally, if you've read much of what I have here, you KNOW I had to write in with my comments.
I emailed Ms. Smith-Arrants and told her that I've been shoopping at the mall for years, and save for a couple of incidents at Belk and the time I was almost kicked off mall property for taking pictures of the buildings, I've been relatively pleased with shopping there.
I think she wanted to play up my experiences as a racial thing, but I explained to her that when you're black, people say stuff and do things like that all the time. It's not really an issue beyond that day unless they do something physically to me, which they did not. If I jumped on everything people did to me that was racist, I'd never get anything else done.
Well, part of what I said made the paper today. The full article can viewed through the link on the title. Below is my mention in the finished article:
SouthPark has a devoted clientele. Some even drive from afar to get here, like Steven Swain who e-mailed from Rocky Mount in the mountains of southwest Virginia.
"It's a three-hour drive and I make it to the mall at least six times a year," he said. "I haven't had a whole lot of trouble getting respect from salespeople ... regardless of how I was dressed, and I'm African American."
He added "ninety-nine percent of the time SouthPark rocks."
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