Quiet No More

Finding Strength in a World of Expectations

• Carmen Cauthen

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What if the silence in your life wasn't just a momentary lapse, but a lifelong companion? 

In this episode Carmen Cauthen courageously unravels her experiences of feeling unseen and unheard under the weight of societal and familial pressures. From questioning her own roots and grappling with racial identity during desegregation, Carmen's poignant journey underscores the silent struggles many face. 

Her story brings to light the tension of living up to academic expectations placed by her parents and the internal turmoil that led her to wonder if she was truly part of her family. As Carmen shares, it's not just about being heard, but about understanding the potential that lies dormant within when one's voice is stifled.

Carmen doesn't shy away from the tough conversations, highlighting the impact of trauma and resilience in her life. By sharing her haunting experience of date rape and the racial discrimination she faced at Georgia Tech, Carmen emphasizes the powerful need for open communication and seeking support. 

Her narrative is a call to action for breaking the silence around painful histories, not just in personal lives but within educational institutions as well. As we reflect on these narratives, we invite you to question what has been left unspoken in your own life and how bringing these stories to light can pave the way for connection and empowerment for future generations.

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Carmen Wimberley Cauthen is an author, speaker, and lover of history, Black history in particular. As a truth teller, she delights in finding the hidden truths about the lives of people who made a difference - whether they were unknown icons or regular everyday people.

To Learn more of Carmen:
www.carmencauthen.com
www.researchandresource.com

Speaker 1:

unseen, unheard. We've lived like that far too long. I'm carmen coffin and this is quiet, no more. Did you ever think about the things that you didn't tell your parents, that maybe you should have told your parents? I don't necessarily mean things that were good. I mean things that happened in your life that were stressful or caused you to question who you were. There were lots of ways I used to question who I was.

Speaker 1:

I never told my parents that when they would question my grades or why I wasn't doing as well as somebody else. You know, or you know sometimes, if I wasn't doing as well in school as my brother. You know, or you know sometimes, if I wasn't doing as well in school as my brother. He was five years younger than me. We weren't supposed to be doing the same well because he was younger, he wasn't having the same kind of work, and so sometimes I would wonder if I'd been adopted because I wasn't, you know, keeping up to their standards. But that's not something I ever asked them about, but I would wonder. I didn't think I looked like my mama or my daddy although I do. Now that I'm an adult I can recognize it but I didn't seem to be smart enough for them. It wasn't just about you know you got to be and should have gotten an A, or you got an A and you should have gotten an A plus. I just didn't ever feel like I measured up in terms of how smart I was supposed to be, and so sometimes I would think that I was adopted, and I'm serious about that. And I wonder now, at the ripe old age of 65, what would my mom have said or my dad have said if I told them that that was what I thought and I didn't recognize that what they were trying to push me to do was to fulfill the potential that they knew I had. You know, if you don't push your children to do, sometimes they just won't, and it's not that they don't have the potential, but they're fighting peer pressure that you may not hear about. You know I didn't come home from school and tell my parents that I was dumped. I was trying to dumb myself down because I was getting picked on for being a black child in gifted and talented classes. But I will say that my dad told me that I came home in seventh grade and said I wasn't going to be smart anymore, and it was a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Speaker 1:

Even when I got to college, I was doing my very best to fit in with the black people and not stand out. You know, back then you, you didn't have very many people going into gifted and talented classes that weren't white, and we still have a lot of that today. Parents have to push for that, but I didn't realize that my desire was to fit in wherever I was. So if I was with the white kids, I wanted to fit in there. And when desegregation started and I wanted to fit in with the black kids who were being bused across town to where I live to go to school, of course I didn't, because I'm unique and I fit in with me. I was dancing and you know, taking dance lessons and walking to school with a violin, and the black kids were coming in on yellow buses. They weren't taking my dance classes and they definitely weren't playing in the orchestra. But I don't think I really explained that to my parents. I just figured that if I wasn't smart, I could be in classes with everybody else, not realizing that you can't really turn off being smart. It's just there. You can try not to take advantage of it, but you know it is what it is.

Speaker 1:

And there were other things that I didn't tell my parents and haven't talked about to very many people. You know, as students, as teenagers, we experiment. We want to. We want to be who everybody else is. You know, and if that means you want to have a boyfriend or a girlfriend, then you want to do that. You don't want to feel like you're different from everybody else.

Speaker 1:

One of the things I never told my parents although I think that they knew was that I was date raped. We didn't talk about those kinds of things. That I was date raped. We didn't talk about those kinds of things. It was important in my family because we went to church and I remember my grandmother talking about not being they didn't say not being sexually active. She said you know, the Bible says flee, fornication. Well, I knew how to flee, but I didn't know what fornication was and I certainly never told her. I didn't know what it meant. I don't think I ever thought about going to look it up in the dictionary, because that's what they would do in my family. If you told somebody you need to know how to spell something or you needed to know what something meant, they send you to look it up. They weren't about to give you the definition, so I never looked it up.

Speaker 1:

I remember my senior year of high school. I had been dating a young man. He started coming to my house in February. He brought gifts for everybody. He brought something, I think he brought something for my brother, he brought flowers for my mother, and you know it was. I thought he was a very nice young man and of course he had to come and visit for a month before they would let us go out on a date. But I didn't know. He already had a reputation of being a little out of control. Now I don't doubt that my parents knew that, which might have contributed to the fact that he had to come to the house for a month before we were allowed to go out. But he went to a different school and I was allowed to go to my senior prom, which was the same night as his.

Speaker 1:

So we tried to make both of them. I remember being so excited because it was kind of my first time having a nice formal dress outside of the debutante ball. I believe I made the dress myself and it was a white. I remember it was a white dress and it was a white. I remember it was a white dress and I remember, at the end of the evening coming home because I had a curfew, we had been to both proms and we're out front of my house, of the house where you really couldn't see from the front door, and you know it was heavy petting and for those of you who don't know what petting is because you're too young, it's necking and you know, kissing in the front seat of the car and I didn't want to have sex and I certainly didn't want to have it in the front seat of his car. But he didn't hear my no and I was a virgin and it was painful and I bled on my white dress and then I had to make up an explanation going in the house because of course my parents, my father, was at the front door and you know I had to say something like my period had started, because I was afraid to tell them the truth, because I was afraid I would get blamed for what had happened and I blocked it out for a long time.

Speaker 1:

The next morning I had to get up. We were going on, a group of students were going on a trip to Washington DC. So you know I threw myself into the rest of the things that I did, but when people started talking in the 80s about 80s and 90s about date rape, I realized that that was what had happened and I realized that I was afraid to tell what had happened to me and I was embarrassed. How often do you run into something that you were afraid to talk about or that comes back up for you when you have, or you hear other people talk about things or you see something on TV and you go, oh, that's what happened to me and I hid it? I I think I was afraid that the reaction would be to punish me for something that maybe I should not have done. Maybe I shouldn't have kissed a boy in the front seat of the car, but it was concerning for me and every once in a while it still pops back up, because I have girls and I want them to know that whatever happens whether it's good or bad that they can come to me, they can talk to me about things that are happening. There were other things that happened as I went off to college that I never told my parents about, and one of them I was a student at Georgia Tech.

Speaker 1:

I was in the design school, and one of the things that I didn't do my senior year of high school was take calculus, and that was because computers had just come out of corporations and come to school. These were not portable computers like we have, these were not laptops, literally. The school that I attended for high school took a storage room and put a table with what looked like a typewriter it's called a teletype that had a phone that connected to the computer. But then there was another piece of equipment that you would take the telephone and you would dial a number. You would be calling the mainframe computer and in this case it was a mainframe computer about 20 miles away in what's known as the Research Triangle Park. So we would call the computer and connect that phone that heads the phone to that piece of equipment and that would connect the computer and make it work. And my parents made me take this class. There were two or three of us in class because they thought computers were the wave of the future, and of course they were. And this was during the time when there were. You know it was binary, so we had little cards with punched holes in them and we would do zeros and Xs and that would be how you'd make the computer talk.

Speaker 1:

But I didn't take calculus and I was going to go to school for architecture and I went to Georgia Tech, and so the calculus classes were difficult for somebody who had not had that kind of math for a year. And, as I said earlier, I was smart, I wasn't accustomed to failing anything, and the first class I took had about two or three hundred kids in it. It was in a huge lecture hall and I didn't know how to ask questions because usually things were easy for me, so I didn't know that I needed help and I failed that first five hour submit quarter course. So I took the course again. The second time I took the course I was in a regular sized classroom. In the first day of class the professor had everybody just stand up from where we were seated and he seated us in the classroom by alphabet and color. So the first rows were for white students, the rows behind the white students were for Puerto Rican students and the rows behind the row behind the Puerto Rican students were for black students.

Speaker 1:

And so I ended up sitting in the back of the classroom already struggling with calculus, and realized that I was going to have to ask some questions. So I made an appointment to meet with my calculus professor and the whole while that he was supposed to be explaining math to me you know paper pencil math to me. You know paper pencil dealing with equations. He looked out the window. I didn't realize that was racist, but I knew it was wrong and it didn't feel good and I didn't know what to do. I didn't know how to. I'd never heard, I'd never thought about or heard about getting a tutor to get some help, and so I just failed that class again and ended up being put on probation and having to leave school. That wasn't a good, happy memory, and trying to explain to my parents why I had made this bad grade twice in the same class was difficult, because they didn't understand that I didn't know how to ask for help. I was not accustomed to asking for help and even when I did ask for help, I was generally told to go and figure it out. So those are things you you might need to think about, especially if you've got children. Are those memories that come up for you? Those weren't the only things I didn't really talk about when I left Georgia Tech.

Speaker 1:

I came back to NC State. I had been accepted at NC State. So I came back and went into political science. That was my major and I remember my freshman year. The black girl who had been a JV cheerleader the year before was the only person on the squad who did not make it to the varsity cheerleading squad, and she was the only black cheerleader. So that was an uproar. We were not happy about it and we you know, we we couldn't figure out what to do and all I could think was we have to talk about this, we have to say something. So we I was like, let's meet at the student union. And we did. The black students met student union and we protested. It was there that I started to understand the importance of community activism. We knew that the football team members couldn't actively protest. What they did was put black armbands on, and they would you know, but they weren't saying anything. But they understood the importance of this moment, the need for solidarity, and so that was when I realized the importance also of organizations like the NAACP. And so I reached out to the pastor of my home church and he helped me to start an NAACP chapter on campus.

Speaker 1:

This was back in 1978 or 1979. And eventually the young lady was given a position on the varsity cheerleading squad. But what if we hadn't said anything? What if we hadn't talked about it? Would she have made it? It was just a time of change. This was shortly after white colleges had begun to accept federal funds and to accept black students into their schools. This was shortly after the desegregation of public colleges, and I was part of a gospel choir and the North Carolina State University received federal funds that they could use to bring other Black students into the campus, and so the gospel choir would travel around the state and sometimes up and down the eastern seaboard to recruit students, and that money that was used to get the buses and to get our dashikis that we wore before we got choir robes that money was considered part of the recruitment fund of North Carolina State University for minority students.

Speaker 1:

A lot of people don't know that. A lot of people just think that those schools opened up and people just started to go there. But that wasn't. That's not true, and those were things that we didn't talk about at my house. We participated, but we didn't necessarily talk about them, and so I wonder, what kinds of things have you not talked about that occurred to you or something that you worked on because of something that happened in the space and the realm, that, where you were, you know. It's just important that we not only remember some of those things, but that we talk about them and talk about the importance of how we reacted, how we interacted afterwards, because it's always going to be important for us to remember to be quiet no more. You've been listening to Quiet no More where I share my journey, so you can be quiet no more. Let's connect at wwwcarmencawthoncom.