A Day Without an Arab

[marshamusic]

No good???

No, no, no! Awesome!

Top to bottom, Honk, I couldn't have said it better myself.
What comes from the heart, reaches the heart and I felt that - including your point about the thread title.

*******

I always wonder what kind of quality of work life could it possibly be, to be encapsuled in that awful plexiglass for however many hours a day - and, depending on the location - contending with-who-knows-what manner of urban insanity on a daily basis.

The rudeness from station owners or workers that I have personally experienced [[yes, I have) can only be a projection of their own existence, having to be proprietors in the most miserable of these situations. I do not take it personally.

I do not tolerate it, either. Nor do I “demand” respect.
When a proprietor, especially one younger than either one of my sons, greets me with “hey sweetie”, I respond with, “that would be ma’am”.

When they react in surprise, since they are accustomed to speaking with female customers with undue familiarity, I tell them that they do not know me well enough to address me in that way, as I am old enough to be their mother or even grandmother.

I do not talk to them with hostility [[not my style), and in fact, I am very friendly [[my style); but I make it clear that I intend that this be a “teaching moment”, at least as regards to me.

They always apologize and they always call me “ma’am” in the end, and if I return and they remember me. I attribute this “lack of respect” to their [[often patronizing) attempts to be convivial in an confusing racial landscape in which they often deal with an undereducated, unmannerable, chaotic clientele, born of the crisis in the city, that allows and elicits less than cordial treatment.

My late aunt, raised in the generation of open, legal racial prejudice and the demeaning of blacks, would always say to me, “I do not beg and pay” [[a lesson for us all), and would cause no scene if ill-treated; she’d simply leave, and refuse to patronize a place where she felt disrespected, if at all possible.

We were always taught, as children, ways to avoid problems based on prejudicial views of us – one of them, as Dawsey says, was making sure you are given a bag, so as not to be wrongfully accused of shoplifting - and as a gesture of being treated as an equal customer.

It has taken me years to not ask for a bag for even the tiniest item, that habit is so ingrained! LOL!

Though it would not have been my reaction, Dawsey's stand off on the bag was his reaction - likely a result of probably numerous simliar situations in these stores - of being an educated professional being treated the same way they might react to the "underclass".

******

The question often comes up, as it has in this thread, why don’t blacks own these stores? Well, of course there are a number of complex reasons, but one is, in a generational sense, we’ve “been there, done that”.

Blacks have already owned gas stations in Detroit. Many of the old gas stations that you see in the neighborhoods were owned by blacks, back in the day [[before gas stations became these quasi party-store marts that they are today).

When I said this to a group of students recently, they simply could not fathom this; our cultural eye in Detroit has become so accustomed to Middle Easterners owning gas stations that to think of blacks behind a gas station counter is incongruous.

Due to the extremely long hours; the need for providing other costly services; getting edged out of the oil company networks; post-segregation access to other jobs and education - most black gas station owners did all they could to educate their children out of the gas station business, such that the next generation did not continue in this profession.

It is this vacuum that, initially, many of the Middle Eastern owners filled.
The most recent example [[that I know of) of African American ownership of a Detroit gas station was a relatively recent [[within the last 10 years) acquisition of the station on Warren and I-75, northeast corner, which only lasted a few short years.

Whenever there is a hue and cry about why we don’t own these gas stations, I am like really??? You want to be in that plexiglass box all day, maybe 12 hours a day?

Methinks not; nor do folks really want to deal with the more unstable element of the city’s “underclass”.

I do not wish to generalize, as many gas stations are located in more stable areas of the city, and are not in such a chaotic environment - but you get my point.

So, was the incident with Dawsey "racist" or not? I don’t know. I know that we [[blacks) often describe rude behavior towards us as “racist” when it may or may not be – but I also know that others [[whites) often deny that “race” has anything to do with anything, no matter how systemic and common are behaviors directed towards us.

Bottom line is, we are locked in a dirty Detroit dance in these encounters - and only the most empathetic approach of each party towards the others will help us all.

[btw, even though I flinch every time I see this thread title, I want to believe the poster is referencing the old literary work that imagined a day without black people in a small town – and begged the question as to who would fill the vacuum of those who did all of the unpleasant labor, therein.]