waiting in line-- not the same day but the same store
(Image by Rob Kall) Details DMCAI was waiting in line to get into a store when it opens. There's always a line and I was second in line, arriving 25 minutes before opening. The person in front and the two after me were women of color. The first woman in line had been waiting for over an hour.
About ten minutes before opening, two middle-aged women ignored the line, which had about a dozen people at that point, and created their own line-- standing in front of the door. I don't like line cutters. So I told them there's a line. One replied, "we're only going in to get through the store to the mall."
"The guard will send you to the end of the line when the store opens," I admonished.
"We're not going in to buy," one replied.
I shrugged my shoulders and made a face, saying, "Usually, by the time they open, the line is around the corner."
They moved to the back of the then short line, behind maybe ten people. ( By the time the store opened, I was proved right. The line was around the corner-- over 50 people.
After they did, one of the women of color thanked me, saying that she couldn't have done that without getting flack or even in trouble.
I paused, thought, then said, "Happy to use my white privilege."
It took me that moment to realize that such a thing would be an example of white privilege. But she was right.
It's not like I am not aware of my white privilege. I am aware of it when I speed up, five or seven miles over the speed limit and pass people of color going exactly the speed limit. My risk is so much less.
Doing my new business, buying liquidation items and reselling them has opened a new world to me, meeting so many more people-- fellow shoppers and the employees of the stores I go to quite regularly. Drop me an email if you want to know my Ebay and Facebook Marketplace links. rob at opednews.com
Bottom-line. white people have incredible privilege that people of color, people who are otherized, do not have, in more ways than we can imagine.
Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.
Check out his platform at RobKall.com
He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity
He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered
first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
people on his Bottom Up Radio Show,
and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and
opinion sites, OpEdNews.com
more detailed bio:
Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, (more...)
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