I don't understand Racism at all. I got a heaping dose when I moved to Alabama. No not from everyone, but a few. A few too many just the same. Usually the ones who were acting this way, were negative on many things. The government, the neighbors, the company, etc etc.
These are generally people who are not happy with themselves. I did see a positive change in one Mother whose son became friends with a neighbor boy. No more racial slurs from her.
Funny...huh?

chick

Racial slurs. Hate them. Just hate them. It really shows the inner workings of someone. Shows a clear lack of intelligence. Needless and useless behavior. Makes me so sad.

It's funny you ladies mention the negativism and how it really is more a reflection of what is going on with the people themselves than anything about the people they are criticizing. Haven't you noticed that people usually reveal their bigotry within a few minutes of speaking with them? I used to guess it took about 10 minutes for them to reveal their true colors.

Uvagolfmom in many cases people do reveal their bigotry in a few minutes. What disappoints me most? When people say they are not racist...but. It's the "but" that gets me.
chick

I wanted to tell all of you that I've been in touch with the woman about us writing this book on corporate wives. We want to explain why corporate rules are set up, what happens when they aren't followed but more importantly, how a woman can keep from losing herself in the middle of it. I'm excited.

Chickadee, you are so right, I had to laugh rather than cry. It is sort of like how I tease my husband how he says "Maybe it's me" only when he does not really think so. The "but" can be a big one. It makes me think I need to be more thoughtful about my use of the word "but" myself, and make sure it really is a fair "but".

Dianne,
If you want a good place to talk with corporate wives. Go up to Wayzata, MN, where your husband is and visit the Newcomers' Club. It is literally filled with corporate wives!

On the other topic: I have a distaste for intolerance for those who are different from oneself or have different ideas. Being from the South, I have heard judgments made all my life about the educational and intellectual status of Southerners as well as the attitude that if you are a Southerner, you are by default a racist.

That is absolute B.S. People from the South are not stupid and are not racist to any greater degree than the people that I have met since I have been living in the North. The biggest difference I can find is that Northerners don't have a Southern accent. People are just people, and you are going to find examples of every possible expression no matter where you go.

Bigotry is the tool people use when they need to put someone else down so that they can feel better about themselves. Like someone said earlier, they just need to get over themselves!

Dannye, are they young corporate wives or ones who have been in the corporate world for a while? Thank you for that info.

I've noticed that people consider a woman who has a Southern accent to be gentle, sweet, kind and the original Georgia Peach. But a man with the same accent is automatically lowered in IQ because of it. Isn't that strange? Here I am, living in TN and trying to get an accent!

I am confused by this topic, but I think I might have been in this situation without really thinking about it.
I was married to a man who was CEO of a good sized company at the same time my own company grew as large as the one he headed.
Strangely, people from his company treated me as if I had a nice little hobby. In fact, my own family treated me the same way. I would be in the middle of a multi-millin dollar negotiation and my sister would call and be upset if I didn't drop everything and go shopping.
I mostly just ignored the whole thing. And when I was with my husband's company, I just played the little wife.
If the people who worked for me were intimidated, they certainly never showed it. And there were times when I wanted to be more intimidating.
Sometimes especially the doctors seemed to resent that I owned the company and made more money than they did. A couple tried unsuccessfully to get my contracts, but over all everyone ignored everyone else and did their job. I rarely socialized with anyone who worked for me though I had a lot of parties, etc. for my husband's co-workers.
It was a weird time I guess.
smile

I think the problem is that people create a hierarchal standard, grouping or trying to group people into different boxes to make it acceptable for their minds to deal with because that is how people's minds have been trained since kindergarten.

Due to this boxing and categorizing people in relationship to their education or jobs, we have all become more insulated from our own thought processes en masse.

Most people lack a feeling of self-acceptance and need to be accepted by others based on some standard they have been taught since birth, whether through culture, ideology, education, or the business world, ie their parent's viewpoints and things have always been done.

To buck the standard of society's norm is out of the question in many people's minds because they do not have enough self-acceptance to see a new way of being.. They are forever searching for their own worth in other's eyes, which opens the path for self-judgement, or that of judging others.

To be free of this ladies only requires that you live a path of truth within...and understand that the energy that you live within supercedes the lower vibrations of other people's fear which is the ultimate cause of self-judgment or judging others.

with care
Leigha