Mom and I went to Sur la Table, an upmarket kitchenware store in the vein of Williams-Sonoma, at SouthPark in Charlotte Saturday night. It's one of her favorite stores and it's in my favorite mall.Sur la Table, which is French for "on the table" is filled with thousands of unique, high quality home products...and a couple of goofy ones.
Guess which ones I'm showing? LOL
Isn't it great that black folks come in flavors now? I guess I'm 'white chocolate negro' :-)
This is actually a piece of fine chocolate imported from Spain. It looked delicious, but the name could be considered either offensive or damn funny. I chose the latter, though it made me do a double take.
I wouldn't have thought as much about it if we hadn't been followed around the store by no less than four sales associates. It wasn't just an a attempt at service either. None of the other customers (who happend to be white) were getting that kind of attention, and only one of those four was knowledgeable enough to answer our questions. It made us very uncomfortable, and it made me think that they weren't used to black people shopping there.
At the checkout, I saw these "hangover drops." Despite their willingness to track our every move previously, when we got to the checkout, the sales associate refused to answer the question of what these tasted like. So I figure they taste like Jaegermeister and vomit, which is what my hangovers usually taste like :-)
Well! Apparently you and your mom were caught red-handed 'shopping while *cringe* negro' now weren't you? I guess the employees at 'hoity-toity calphalon and placemats for yuppies' could use some diversity training.
ReplyDeleteI think 'negro' as american vernacular is a term unfamiliar to (or certainly not used by) anyone younger than 70, so buyers and importers of culinary goods feel comfortable exploiting the term for its cosmopolitan aura. I see the term on coffee bags and wine bottles all the time.
My hangovers taste like long-dead roadkill. The alcohol content in mouthwash is so high that I think I receive a buzz from gargling it, providing the essential 'hair of the dog' to navigate me through the first few hours......
Oh, and it means "on the table" not for the table.
ReplyDeleteYou should whip around really quickly and take a quick snapshot of the salesmen following you. If you could get most of them in one frame, they might fear reprisals.
E-mailed you an op/ed piece penned by a local college student experiencing 'shopping while black' at the local A&F. Her attempts to shed light on A&F's racially biased marketing strategies and customer-service practices, in light of the lawsuit that was currently being filed against the clothier, are reallly powerful. Your story reminded me of it...
Thanks for the article. The young woman nailed it right on the head. Like I mentioned, I haven't (luckily) had that same exprerience at A&F, but I've had it at so many other places.
ReplyDeleteMy mom was even more pissed at the "Chocolate Negro" than I was. She was one of the first students to integrate our local "white" high school (they focused on the students they thought would be the "upstanding" blacks in the community at the time, and Graddaddy was a prominent farmer) and she had to put up with a lot of shit just to finish high school.
A lot of places have eradicated or embraced overt rascism to the point that people are desensitized to it or don't believe it exists, but out this way, it's still pretty bad and overt, even though we've made a lot of progress. Those wounds are just waitng to be punctured again, whether intentional or not.