ANS -- White women are the customers who strike fear into the hearts of service workers.

This is very short, but both amusing and an important idea.  We can help by just being old white women.  Yay!

Find it here:  https://medium.com/being-liberal/white-women-are-the-customers-who-strike-fear-into-the-hearts-of-service-workers-6183ded31a5d#.sxr2gzdzy    

--Kim

White women are the customers who strike fear into the hearts of service workers.

We smile and demand to speak to the manager.

I was going to tell you about the scenery in West Virginia but instead here is a sort of self-righteous homily about ethical social engineering.

There was an old black man with a cane in the seat next to me. He'd bought a seat downstairs but they overbooked the train and he was close to crying at the thought of 18 hours with a staircase between him and the bathroom. I went and found the conductor and we straightened that shit out.

An old black man stumbled past me in the middle of the night. He was confused and lost and mostly blind. I sort of grabbed him and he fell down into the seat next to me and he didn't even know where he was, but he handed me his ticket. I bellowed at the conductor down the aisle and we straightened that shit out too.

Gosh, look how nice I am! NOPE. For people like me, nice is a weapon.

White women are the customers who strike fear into the hearts of service workers. We smile and demand to speak to the manager. We calmly ask, "isn't there anything else you can do?" We expect the rules to be bent for us. 
Because we're nice. And well-spoken. And middle-class.

Fellow white ladies: join me in using your terrifying social privileges to say HELLO, MY FRIEND HERE NEEDS SOME HELP. Stand up and tell the person in charge that this black man, this disabled elder, this person who can't afford an upgrade, is important. Insist he be taken care of as well as that whiny lawyer in the dining car.

Be nice. Be eloquent.

Be unrelenting.

Stolen (with approval) from a personal travelogue of Megan Emerson who is currently riding some Amtrak train somewhere in America.

Social EngineeringPrivilegeWhite PrivilegeCustomer ServiceAmtrak

Being Liberal Editor

Because Reality Has a Well Known Liberal Bias - A Liberal Community on Facebook since 2009. Currently 1.5 million fans— posts reaching 14 million people weekly.

Being Liberal

Because Reality Has a Well Known Liberal Bias — The longreads from an over 1.5 million people strong liberal community on Facebook. We are active since 2009, our posts are reaching 14 million people weekly.