The next ridiculous thing, though far more justified than the hate mail, are those who persist in objecting to criticism of the Unfair campaign as using a broad brush to describe people who are "white".
This latter was brought home to me when I checked the usage this morning of my blog. I had over twenty links from http://www.racismreview.com/blog/2012/02/09/see-racism-when-white-unfair-campaign/ to "Is the Un-Fair Campaign Unfair?"
Thanks for the interest, but the link to my blog entry proves my point of the campaign itself being unfair: "much less learning to notice white privilege". I don't think the writer read my blog entry with an open mind.
Let me give a couple examples from my bus driving days in the Twin Cities. The employees and the customers were all over the map as far as wealth, race, and religion. The employees and the customers were all over the map as far as promptness, courtesy, and consideration. The two categories did not map one to one with each other.
The first example started and stopped in a minute. I picked up a busload of kids from an inner-city community center. They were probably all black as were most of the adults. I was driving down a long street with a string of traffic lights. Like a good driver, I was looking well ahead. Except, I was looking too far ahead. One of the adults pointed out that I had run a red light. I acknowledged that I had and I thanked him for pointing it out. I certainly didn't have any "white privilege" that made me right and him wrong.
The second example was a charter that left an extremely angry customer who we lost for repeat business. About six buses were sent out to pick up kids and adults from a all-white church camp about two hours away; the drivers were all white except maybe a Central American Indian. We had no appointed leader and relied on those who had made the trip before on what to expect.
This being before cell phones were so ubiquitous, we had to rely on the camp phone to talk to our Jewish dispatcher to try to resolve some of the problems. He was unsuccessful in mitigating some of the problems, but we did get all the campers back to the Twin Cities, late.
When we got back to the terminal, the black dispatcher was on duty. Boy! Did he lay into us as a group. And he was right; he had probably spent far more time on the phone with the customer than he would have liked.
The only complaint I had with the dispatchers is they didn't appoint a trip leader; we were just a milling crowd at every problem point. Maybe I should have exercised "age" privilege and taken leadership?
