Room with black people
In a previous post, I mentioned a time that someone said something very racist to me and implied that it’s entirely possible that I didn’t correct him on the matter so as not to cause myself discomfort for the remainder of the summer. Mind you, it’s also possible that I did confront him on the matter in dramatic fashion. It was one of those two - my memory’s a little spotty. But just in case you’re inclined to believe the former, I’m going to share with you a story that should redeem myself.
A friend from college was getting married in Arizona. So my other college friends and I were planning the trip out to the wedding. We booked some hotel rooms and later on, I was looking at the hotel’s website. One of the pictures showed a young black couple in a hotel room. I wouldn’t have thought anything of it, but I noticed the filename. I think there was some mouse-over text or something. The filename was “room-with-black-people.jpg”.
I thought that was horrible. I understood that they probably had a bunch of different pictures to appeal to various demographics and that they had just named the files in a way that they could identify them. In some ways, it’s good that at least they were showing different races. But I don’t care, you don’t need to be a PR expert to know that’s not a good way to name your files.
There was a link to email the hotel so I sent them this angry email about how offensive that was and when I looked at the picture I saw a young, attractive, professional-looking couple and why does it matter that they’re black, etc. I was hoping that they’d offer me a free room to make up for it but they didn’t. It would have been perfect if we arrived at the hotel and some manager wanted to apologize to me in person - only to notice I was just some white dude.
I don’t think I even got an apology email, but I checked back on the website later and the file had been renamed to “room-with-people.jpg” which is of course ridiculous. That gave me a huge laugh.
I’m not so sure this was a redeeming story after all considering my main motivation was getting a free room. OK, I admit it, I got nothing.
June 2nd, 2008 at 12:53 am
I could take this reply alot of different directions, but I’ll take the high road and pass along this highly informative instructional video I found a few years ago: http://www.break.com/index/how-to-talk-to-black-people.html.
Wizzle da hizzle be dat shizzle???