Quiet No More

Experiencing a Cultural Wake-Up Call: Confronting Snobbery and Embracing Diversity

• Carmen Cauthen

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What happens when a wedding reception turns your world upside down? Join me, Carmen Cauthen, as I recall a pivotal moment that forced me to confront my own snobbery. Growing up in a world of lavish celebrations, I was unprepared for the humble affair of canned fruit cocktails and white bread sandwiches. This experience was not just a cultural shock but a wake-up call that made me rethink the messy mix of America's cultural melting pot. Through this lens, I explore how deeply ingrained socioeconomic traditions can shape our perceptions and the way we judge those different from us.

Journey with me through the intersection of race, culture, and socioeconomic status, as I share personal stories from my upbringing in a middle-class Black family. Dressing well was more than vanity; it was a shield against the racial profiling that was rampant in desegregated spaces. 

From nostalgic family road trips to Expo 67 to the cautious discernment we practiced during times of racial tension, these experiences reveal how past lessons continue to inform our present interactions. Reflect on the importance of trust, self-awareness, and safety, and see how these themes echo in every choice we make today.

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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

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unseen, unheard. We've lived like that far too long. I'm carmen coffin and this is quiet, no more. So I'm back and I realized something today. When I was on my way to record, I thought I was having a conversation and I thought about.

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There was a time when I realized that I am a snob. People are not going to tell you that they're a snob, but I have recognized that I was raised in a certain socioeconomic tradition of life and that doesn't necessarily translate to what everybody else does. The first time I realized it, I was pregnant with my first child and my husband had been invited to a wedding reception. We had been invited to a wedding reception of some of his, some of the folks he worked with. It was in another town and so I got dressed, we got, he got dressed and we drove there, and when we got there at the appointed time, the reception was in a little small club. To me it was in a warehouse district and to me it was in a hole in the wall. That's the only way I knew to think of it at the time, way I knew to think of it at the time, and you know, I grew up going to receptions in the church hall or at a hotel, big weddings with, you know lots of folks in it, or you know a reception at a country club or something like that and the first thing that happened was the writing room weren't there yet, which was okay, you know you take pictures, but there was nothing set up, nothing. People started putting tables out. If I remember correctly I don't think there were tablecloths, and then there was no caterer. There were tablecloths and then there was no caterer. So I saw people put out big pans and the first thing that I saw somebody open was the industrial size can of fruit cocktail. Now, I'm accustomed to fresh fruit. I'd never even seen cans of fruit cocktail that big. I didn't know they made them, it just never crossed my mind. And then they dumped it all in a big steamer pan and set it on the table and that was the fruit for the reception.

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That was the first inkling I had that I was not like everybody else and that there was a different concept of what you do at a wedding reception or how you serve. I don't even remember what the other food was. I feel like there were sandwiches made out of white bread and maybe some ham or some turkey and cheese and cut up into quarters or something like that. And I'm not saying that anything was wrong, it was just different and it made me reevaluate me, because everybody else was comfortable with this. There were no chairs, everything it was all standing. And you know, if you've ever been pregnant, you know that you only want to stand for a certain period of time. Your back starts to hurt. You're you want, you're just done. You want to sit down, um.

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And so I realized that I, carmen Coffin, um, had some things I needed to work on, and you know we talk in America about um, this, this space is a melting pot. When you come to America, it's a melting pot, is a melting pot. When you come to America, it's a melting pot. But have you ever seen crayons melt? It's just a glob. That's not what we are.

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We are a place where people bring their cultures and their backgrounds, even people who were enslaved. They didn't. Somebody put them on a ship and what they grew up with or what they were accustomed to, that didn't disappear. We all have our customs and traditions, from whatever space our families came from, and so I've recognized that I grew up very middle class. I grew up in some spaces with amounts of money that other people didn't have, and some of my traditions are very let me not say nuanced, they're very pronounced. So there are things that I have expectations of.

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Like I grew up, you didn't go to church dressed just any kind of way. In fact, as a Black girl, we didn't even go shopping dressed any kind of way. My mother was always well-dressed when she went out shopping. Now, that could be because once stores were integrated, desegregated, and if you were Black and you went to the store, if you weren't dressed well, then people would follow you around the store to make sure you weren't stealing anything. That's white people, and I don't know how much that has changed today. And people today don't dress to go shopping necessarily. Today's formal, more formal dress can be very much dressed down. So what does that mean for those people who are working in a store, who are employees or who are the security, who do they look at first to see who might steal something? They watch and they follow you through the store. That's not old, that's new. That still happens today. That's new, that still happens today.

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I don't dress up necessarily to go to the store, but I don't dress down to go to the store either. I still dress very middle class and I don't necessarily pay attention to see if somebody is following me around in a store. I have come to not expect that, but I know that that happened when I was growing up, and part of that is because my mother was an educator. She made decent money. My father was a pharmacist. He made decent money and he would give her money to go shop. And I remember my mother and my grandmother refused to shop at JCPenney's for a long time because they did not think that the things in that store were worthy of them taking the time to shop there, and so that's how I learned to shop. I learned to shop in middle class stores, in middle-class stores. If we were in New York City, we would go in some of the higher-end department stores and it was a treat, and if you got something it was special and you took care of it. You didn't let it go. So those are just things that I have learned that I have to look at for myself, because I'm never sure whether I'm being a snob or not, and so I'm just curious. Are there things that you have realized that you have certain predilections for? There are only certain places that you want to shop.

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When I was younger I used to craft a lot. I made jewelry and a friend of mine did floral arrangements and wreaths and we literally covered the state doing craft fairs and selling during the spring and the summer. And I remember going somewhere and it was in a smaller county, there probably weren't as many black people there, and I needed to stop and either go to the restroom or get something to drink and she said we can't go there, their people don't know our people. And I just looked at her like she was crazy. It didn't dawn on me that what she was saying was this was a rural community. We were two single Black women and we didn't know what kind of reception we would get. And it was important during that period of time that was during the 80s we weren't that far out of a racist era that I would think of then that we were safe going in places where there were not people who looked like us, who could or would be willing to serve us, and so we didn't go in those places. It was no different than in 1967.

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When we were growing up, the World's Fair was in Montreal, was called Expo 67. And so we drove from Raleigh to Montreal. We stayed in, I think, an apartment. My grandmother went with us. We stopped in places like Plymouth and I believe it was Santa's Village in New Hampshire, and it was my first time having Canadian bacon. I just have to throw that in there because I like Canadian bacon.

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But when we stopped somewhere to get gas, daddy felt like he was lost and he had gone in the store to pay for the gas. And you know, this was a time period when hotels were just being desegregated. So generally we would either stay at a Holiday Inn, which mama was more comfortable with, or maybe a Howard Johnson's, but those were the only hotels that we would stay at while we were on the road. And when daddy went in and paid for the gas and came back out, I don't know if he was looking at a map or what, but I do remember that a white man told him we could just follow him and he would lead us back to the highway. And he got in the car and he told mama that and she was like no, us back to the highway. And he got in the car and he told mama that and she was like no, you, you don't know this man, you don't know where he's going to take us or if we're going to survive to get out of there.

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And um, you know that that was another learning experience for me, that I couldn't trust everybody, even if they were nice and compassionate or seem to be. I had to consider other ramifications Am I going to be safe with this person? Am I to trust that they are going to do what they say? And those are things that we have to do with all of our relationships.

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But those were important at that time because we didn't know if we would be safe. We just had to discern in every area of life shopping, traveling, all types of things Were we safe and are there other ways for us to look at how we're doing things? And so I learned to be discerning and to recognize things in myself that might be make me not safe or make me a victim of something, and so those are things that we don't necessarily think about about ourselves. We think about them about other people. But you know, we have to start to learn to check those things in ourselves, and in the process of doing that, we have to be quiet. No more You've been listening to Quiet no More, where I share my journey, so you can be quiet.