Growing up urban, blue collar white trash, in a mixed neighborhood, and tracked by the schools for a life of factory work, while going outside to play with the available kids seems to have been my most valuable exposure to life on many levels. The older I get the more I feel sorry for people living in the kind of isolated fear that breeds people who need to pay to “meet a black person” but am not sure which is worse, those people or the woman who is now 16-years into doing it as a thing, like she was a Margaret Mead version of eHarmony.
Oddities like this are maybe the only things I miss about being in the spotlight, well that and the money, but I digress. I would LOVE to have her on my old radio show and love even more to watch the old Stephen Colbert cover her event with a stone-poker-face.
With neither my old radio show or Colbert being handy I simply picked up the phone and called the event organizer, Cheryle Moses of Urban Mediamakers in Georgia.
Moses is an enthusiastic, grandmotherly sounding, 58 year old black woman (pictured) who was more than happy to engage in conversation about her event. She told me that the idea came about after she read a poll showing that north of “75% of whites have no friends of other colors.” To that end she had some “50 people” show up at “Come Meet A Black Person”, “around 8 of them white.”
With the pleasantness disposed of it was time to get to the question, which Moses answered that being offended by her event or title is simply an “unformed” reaction and asked me right back. “What’s insulting about ‘Come Meet A Black Person’?” “We’re not animals in a zoo” … “there’s a difference between ‘meet, and ‘see.‘” She elaborated in a piece on The Root, “White people are oblivious. We know them. We have to know them, you know. It’s not like that for them. They don’t know anything about us, they don’t have to.” So far the reaction in black audience targeted media ranges from mildly annoyed to mildly supportive of Moses’ idea.
Mine is still to wonder who are these Bubble People and where do they come from and
I really have to wonder though. If Cheryle was white or, God Forbid, a Trump supporter, what would the headlines about this be then?
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