Sweet Insanity

At a friend’s birthday party recently, cake was offered to another friend to take home. Her response was, Oh sure, the skinny girl pushes off the cake to the fat girl. The odd thing was that the skinny girl wasn’t skinny and the fat girl wasn’t fat, and neither were girls. They were sixty-year old women.

Yesterday, at the end of a department holiday party, a manager offered remaining decorated cupcakes to a co-worker. She responded with, and this is a paraphrase, as another co-worker told me about this exchange, You mean you want to give the poor black woman the leftovers? The white manager stuttered for a response… something like, No, you have five kids, I thought they’d like them. Then, she walked away. I understand that there was an apology a little later from the women with the kids. I don’t know who took home the desserts. The manager was white and a woman. The other person was black, a woman and mother of five children.

I do know that these are both examples of dots connecting to places never expected.

A few weeks ago, I completed a two-day course on diversity taught by a sixty-year old white male and an ageless black woman who told us she was older than her teaching partner. The course offered multiple opportunities to identify the filters by which we see, hear and react to people. One exercise instructed the participants to stand by a sign that made them feel most uncomfortable when discussing it. I found it difficult to choose between all of them, race, age, sexual preference, gender, religion, height, weight, able bodiedness or socio-economic status. For another exercise, participants stood on a masking tape line, then move a step forward or back for life experiences that presumably helped or hindered a person to succeed by conventional standards... getting educated, having access to transportation, money worries. It reminded me of the game Mother May I where one takes baby steps or giant steps forward, but if caught, you had to start over. I grew up mostly with all giant steps forward. One person barely left the line and other went so far behind the line that again, I was glad we had an opportunity to talk right there about the gap between us. The course continues to come to mind as the news shows the murders of black men by white policeman. 

Top of mind perceptions of how the world sees us triggered the quick and biting response in the two instances in my life. I might have determined that there was a unifying reason that catalyzed the hurtful words spoken... cake. I mean, I know the people involved, it’s hard for me to think that any of them meant ill will for the other. Yet, the words spilled out.

The murders were the same issues taken to exponential lengths. Sons died. Sons shot other sons. There are people who defend the deaths.  There are people who gather together to rally against the deaths. When and where are we sitting down and discussing it?  The conversation might be nice over a piece of cake.