How not to talk to The Help
Good grief.
First I see this:
Then I see a reply saying Lady SH is Lady Susan Hussey so I hie me to Google for information on Lady SH and find a bouquet of headlines saying she’s resigned. I chose the BBC:
Lady Susan Hussey quits over remarks to charity boss Ngozi Fulani
The late Queen’s lady-in-waiting Lady Susan Hussey has apologised and resigned after she repeatedly asked a black British charity boss where she was from.
Ngozi Fulani, a charity founder, was questioned about her background at the charity event at the palace on Tuesday. Ms Fulani said she was “totally stunned” by Prince William’s godmother’s comments.
The palace described the comments as “unacceptable and deeply regrettable”. An eyewitness to the conversation, Mandu Reid, told the BBC Lady Susan’s questions had been “offensive, racist and unwelcoming”. She said she had a “sense of incredulity” about the exchange in which Ms Fulani was interrogated about where she was from, even though she had already explained she was born and lived in the UK.
This is their job, pretty much the whole of it – celebrating and rewarding people who do good work. Royalty and the nobility are obviously an absurd anachronism with little or nothing to justify their status, so surely the most basic duty they have is to do the celebrating and rewarding properly. It’s been common knowledge for years that singling certain kinds of people out for the “Where you from?” interrogation is, yes, racist. Persisting in the question after a very clear response that it’s not an ok question is off the charts. That’s without even talking about the bit where Lady SH moved Ms Fulani’s hair.
Here’s one way to handle that:
https://youtu.be/crAv5ttax2I
Sometimes I am with a group of friends, and we talk about where our parents/grandparents/great-grandparents, etc, originated. This is usually when we are all white and relatively the same social class. It’s sort of a fun thing to compare ancestry. But this is not that…this is intrusive, and is implying the woman isn’t actually British, because she “came from” somewhere.
It’s easier for white people, anyway. I can tell people my mother is half Irish, half Swedish, and my dad is English on both sides (but there may be some mixed in ethnicities we don’t know about), and it doesn’t mean anything. It just means that I, like most other people here in the US, do not have a “pure” ethnicity, because the melting pot melted and produced me.
I do talk to my students about part of it, because we have a great discussion about the Irish Potato Famine, which is the only reason I exist, if you want to think about that. (Of course, there are a lot of other “only” reasons I exist, such as my mom joining the Navy and meeting my dad…it can go on forever.) But they enjoy hearing that. And they will occasionally share ethnicities with me; my hispanic students are rarely from Mexico these days, but often from South America. If we are talking about something in that area, they love to stick their hand up and say they know about that because they’ve been there, or something similar. That is on their initiation…it is what they want. I don’t ask students to list their ethnicity on anything. I imagine the school does, but that information is not shared, nor should it be.
I have to remind myself that yes, people really are so provincial that this actually does happen. It’s easy to forget sometimes, since I’ve never witnessed it in person.
What an appalling story. Lady Susan Hussey may be somewhat older than I am (but not by much) but she should realized that talking in a way that might have been commonplace in the 1950s is utterly unacceptable in 2022. I’m glad she has resigned.
I have a less gross story, but still illustrating how far we still have to go. I anonymize it a bit, because I don’t think that people should be easily identifiable if they haven’t given permission. I know a senior academic in a British university whose wife is a black African. Once at a formal dinner with she went to the place marked with her name, but before she sat down she was approached by two ladies (white, of course) who said “I think, my dear, that this is not where you should be sitting.”
iknklast:
Likewise, so do I. My father was English as far back as you can go, with a very high proportion of ancestors from one county (Devon). My mother was Irish, with origins partly around Dublin, and partly around Londonderry, but Protestant either way (important in Ireland — no one cares today in England). That’s fairly typical for generations earlier than mine, but it has changed out of all recognition. Nowadays it’s not uncommon to find people with the most diverse origins. One of my nephews has a Malaysian wife, but as a more extreme case my twin grandchildren have grandparents from three continents, Europe, South America, Asia, and four countries, UK, France, Chile, Syria. My grandson, however, looks very Northern European, indeed he looks very much as I did at the age of 7, and has little to suggest his diverse origins. His sister, on the other hand, is quite exotic in appearance — not obviously Chilean or Syrian, but certainly not British or French. When they were born the other grandmother said that there were one French baby and one Syrian baby; I preferred to say that there were one British baby and one Chilean baby.
SH is apparently 83 years old. I don’t mean to make excuses for her clear racism, but I wonder if she’s in the early stages of dementia; her behavior as described is far outside the bounds of social acceptability, and one would imagine that, as lady-in-waiting to the Queen, she has had to interact respectfully with people of other ethnicities at many points throughout her public life. Obviously, she’s not fit to do . . . whatever it is she was doing (waiting? ladying?) . . . but this might be a clue that she needs to have her cognitive health evaluated.
@5 I agree–in my limited experience with elites, and my even more limited experience with royals (I understand SH is not a royal, but it sounds like her job involves spending a lot of time around them) the one thing they actually are good at is being pleasant to people. And if the conversation has been reported verbatim ‘I spent time in France’ is a weird nonsequitur.
Plus the whole pushing it despite clear obvious resistance. Surely that’s one of the things you just don’t do when your role involves making pleasant conversation with people of all kinds. You don’t push, you don’t insist, you don’t ignore discomfort or irritation. You don’t offer reasons to bring out the guillotine.
Yeah, asking one time the “where are you from” question is bad but maybe not resignation-worthy. Persisting in that way is just way over the line, though, as both racist and rude.
I don’t really have much use for or patience with discussions of genealogy or ethnic background, and usually try to blow by it as quickly as possible. Of course, that works pretty well for me as a white guy, since when someone asks me that question it’s usually just a sign that they want to discuss their own background and so they’re happy to move the discussion off me and onto them. (I mean, this still means I’m stuck listening to them wax rhapsodic about how their personality is totally explained and excused by their family background. Dude, your shitty temper isn’t any more charming because one of your great-grandparents emigrated from Ireland or whatever…..)
I’m really annoyed by people who pretend to be talking to you but are really just creating an opening for talking about themselves. It’s not that I want to talk about myself, it’s just that it’s so tacky, so self-y. I get sooooooooo tired of selfism.
Slight lurch off-topic there, sorry.
The whole story is shocking, but on reflection I think the worst bit is this:
Effectively she’s saying that she’s an important upper-class person and that Ngozi Fulani is no one, an uppity nigger who needs to answer whatever question is put to her by her betters.
The rest of it is just thoughtless clumsy stupidity.
I don’t know – I think she may have thought she was just “bantering,” that Fulani was just shy or awkward, or something along those lines. I mean the whole conversation is predicated on Lady SH’s vast superiority in the scheme of things, but that must apply to pretty much everyone at such gatherings. It’s the nature of the game: we are the upper crust and we are bestowing prizes on you plebeians. Don’t be shy, dear, tell me about yourself.