Too touchy?

I don’t consider myself easily offended. I make and laugh at jokes about women, black people, New Jerseyans, Americans, Christians, liberals, and a host of other groups to which I belong. And I do believe that non-black people can talk about, or disagree with, black people without automatically being considered racist. So why did it bother me so much today when a white coworker used the word “uppity” to describe an annoying black patron?

I’ve been thinking about it for the last couple of hours, and I think I’m bothered because the word uppity has such a troubling history. When I hear it, I think of a person whose behavior is somehow above what could reasonably be expected from one of his or her station. I don’t know if this is a definition that would be used by that any significant portion of the non-black population when defining uppity, but it’s probably what a lot of black people think when they hear it. This word has been the subject of recent press, after Lynn Westmoreland, a Republican Congressman from Georgia, used it to describe Barack and Michelle Obama, then claimed to be ignorant of any racial connotations to the word. He’s from Georgia. Even if that’s not what he meant when he said the word, I find it unlikely that he could have spent the past 58 years in Georgia without somehow knowing that this word might have had a racist connotation. His explanation that he thought they were elitist and snobbish also makes no sense. They’re pretty high up on the freaking totem pole, buddy. Certainly higher than you. How do you expect them to behave? Also, I’m really love it if I Westmoreland could answer this question: what about a duly elected senator who won his party’s vote to be their Presidential candidate could be considered too elite? Don’t we want our leaders to belong to a relatively high class in society? Who should be of a higher class than those who aspire to lead our nation? And if that higher class does exist, why aren’t they running things?

So this patron was annoying, but in the same way that scores of other patrons are annoying many times throughout the day. She didn’t seem to look down on us, she just didn’t really care that what she wanted didn’t conform to library rules. She was over the whole rules thing, but she never acted as though she was above us. I get along just fine with my coworker and I’ve never thought for a second that he might have a problem with me due to my race, but things like this always make me uneasy.