Quiet No More

Breaking Stereotypes and Embracing Unique Gifts

September 01, 2024 • Carmen Cauthen

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Can a single word alter the course of someone's life? 

Join Carmen Cauthen in this episode of 'Quiet No More' as she recounts a childhood memory that resonated through her life—a racial slur uttered by another child. 

This moment, laden with pain and ignorance, opens the exploration of how name-calling is more than just words, but a deeply ingrained behavior that perpetuates racism and shapes identity. Carmen shares her struggle with feeling out of place, being mistaken for a white girl due to her modulated voice, emphasizing how harmful language can fragment one's sense of belonging and self-worth across racial lines.

Discover Carmen’s journey towards self-validation and breaking free from societal stereotypes around beauty and intelligence. She candidly reflects on her battles with self-perception, stemming from a lack of external validation, and the critical role of affirming one's own unique qualities. 

The episode also celebrates the diverse forms of intelligence we all possess—from academics to creative talents. Carmen's insights underscore the importance of recognizing and embracing our individual gifts to contribute meaningfully to our communities. 

This episode is a powerful call to eradicate harmful language and champion the beauty of our unique identities.

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Carmen Wimberley Cauthen is an author, speaker, and lover of history, Black history in particular. As a truth teller, she delights in finding the hidden truths about the lives of people who made a difference - whether they were unknown icons or regular everyday people.

To Learn more of Carmen:
www.carmencauthen.com
www.researchandresource.com

Speaker 1:

Unseen, unheard. We've lived like that far too long. I'm Carmen Coffin and this is Quiet, no More. You know what really pisses me off? It's name-calling. Have you ever been called, as the old folks say, outside of your name? I have been. It is not a good feeling and I've seen it happen to other people and I can't stand it. I think, as I'm learning more about being judgmental, I'm realizing that name calling is part of that, realizing that name-calling is part of that.

Speaker 1:

The first time I really remember being called a name, I was walking home from school, from that white school in that white neighborhood, and there was a little child who couldn't have been four, who looked at me and called me a nigger. I hated it. I don't know what I would have done If I hadn't been across the street and I was only ten and he was with an adult. But I knew it was a bad word and I knew it wasn't what I was because my mother had explained to me what a nigger was and that was somebody who was uneducated and ignorant. That wasn't me. I was in school. Mama said it was a bad word, word and people called black people that. But I was neither of those things. I was neither of those things, but it hurt my feelings. It didn't make me think less of myself, but I wondered why somebody would teach a little child to say something mean. And as I've gotten older I realized that people don't always teach children how to be mean. Some things you catch you're not taught. Some things you catch you're not taught. You might catch something at the dinner table that the adults didn't think you were supposed to hear, but they said it Like you've got ears, we clean the wax out of them. So you heard it. You might not know exactly what it meant, but you know if it was good or bad you can tell from the tone of the conversation. So we don't use that word. We were always taught to not use that word. I can't think of anybody that it would apply to. I don't know anybody who's ignorant or not educated about something. Everybody knows something. So we needed to strike that one out of the dictionary.

Speaker 1:

You know I said earlier that I never really knew where I fitted in. I felt alone. Well, obviously, on the white side of town. I didn't fit in, if by no other reason than by virtue of my skin color. But my dad had a drugstore and this was in the 60s and the 70s. They didn't have cell phones back then. What they did have was answering machines big, heavy answering machines and leave it on the answering machine that told the hours that the drugstore was open and also, you know, if you needed to leave a message, if you needed to leave a refill message or something like that, and sometimes he would let me record the message. And I loved doing that, because you know I like to talk. I came in one day to with him in the morning and listened to the message and this young I assume it was a young girl said mama, who's that white girl on Doc's answering machine? Well, I'm not white machine. Well, I'm not white. I didn't understand why she said that. I had no idea that my voice at that point because I had spent so much time around white people had become modulated. But you know that was almost as bad as being called a nigger. It meant I didn't really have a place on either side of the table. I'm concerned about this name-calling thing.

Speaker 1:

There were other things that I was told like people would call me pretty. I have always had a hard time believing that I was pretty. I remember hearing that pretty is as pretty does. I tried to do pretty, but I never looked in the mirror and thought that I was pretty or beautiful. I'm still working on that. Do you ever have trouble with that? I know that the inside of me is pretty. I know that the thoughts in my head for the most part are pretty. But looking in the mirror and thinking that, you know, it wasn't always validated. So most of the time I was married.

Speaker 1:

If I asked my husband how did I look when I'd put something on, he'd say okay. Well, okay is not pretty. I'm not even sure okay is acceptable. It just means I guess I'm covered. And so sometimes I would go I mean, can you give me a little more than that? And you know well, you look all right.

Speaker 1:

That's not helpful either. I mean I don't want to be ugly. I don't want to be ugly in how I look or how I act, but sometimes we just need some validation. So you know what I'm learning to do now Validate my own damn self. I look good. I am foxy Now. That doesn't mean I've got on makeup. I mean I do right now. That doesn't mean I couldn't stand to lose a little weight. But if I don't call myself the name. How am I going to walk it out? I got to talk about how good I look and I'm not talking about, you know, conceited. I'm not talking about being arrogant, you know, conceited. I'm not talking about being arrogant. I'm just talking about talking to myself, encouraging myself. Do you do that? I'm not talking about saying affirmations. You can do that if that works for you. But sometimes I just need to look at myself and go girl, you still got it. Sometimes I need to look at myself and go girl, you need to it. Sometimes I need to look at myself and go girl, you need to do a little work in that area, but I need to do it for me. It needs to be in my head, in my mind, and I've had to train my girls to do the same thing and I did a good job training them.

Speaker 1:

I'll never forget walking past my younger daughter's bedroom one day and the door was cracked and I could hear her saying something. So I pushed it open just a little bit more and she was sitting there going you are awesome, you are awesome, you are awesome. And I was like, okay, let me back on out the door. And that's probably been 20 years ago. She's 23 now and I asked her a couple of weeks ago do you still tell yourself that? And she kind of giggled and said yeah. I said okay, okay. Well, you know, know, if you don't take up for you, you can't expect somebody else to so keep doing that thing. And if you're embarrassed to do it in front of other people, go in the bathroom and shut the damn door. Tell yourself who you are.

Speaker 1:

I am black. I am beautiful. I have gorgeous gray hair. My lips are kissable. For those of you who don't know it, I got some new teeth. They're cute too. I got some new teeth, they're cute too. And I know there's some folk out there who like curves and there's some folk who don't. Well, you know that kind of divides, who I'm going to be with? Because I got a few, had some of them for a long time, and that's okay.

Speaker 1:

I did not come from a group of skinny women. My family had some meat on their bones. They're not fat, they just had some meat on their bones and they taught us it was okay to be that way. I don't have to look like Barbie Now. My husband's great aunt used to tell me that I had a Coca-Cola bottle shape. That's another name, Colin, but have you looked at a Coca-Cola bottle lately? They're kind of cute too. I ain't talking about the two liter bottles, I'm talking about them, glass ones, and if you haven't seen one you need to go to the store and find you one of them, glass Coca-Cola bottles. So that was high cotton compliments when I was growing up and she was old, so it must have been high cotton compliments when she was growing up too, been high cotton compliments when she was growing up too.

Speaker 1:

Now, the other thing that has been a struggle for me all my life is understanding that I am smart. Smart what does smart mean? You know, sometimes that was a curse, sometimes that was having your name called. It wasn't a good thing to be smart. I remember after they desegregated the school system in Raleigh, when I was walking to middle school and the black kids the rest of the black kids were being bussed in. I'm walking with a violin in my hand. In its case there wasn't anybody else black taking violin or bringing one on the bus, and I was in gifted and talented classes and usually there was one or two black students to a class and being smart was not something that I felt like being proud of because it kept me away from the black kids that I was trying to spend time with.

Speaker 1:

I wanted to be black, but if I was black and there weren't very many other black kids in the class, that was not a good thing, and they would tell me oh, you think you're smart? Well, I didn't think nothing. I was just doing what I was supposed to do. I was doing my homework. I was, because, you know, at my house doing my homework. I was because, you know, at my house, even though my dad didn't get home before I went to bed, a lot of nights my homework had to be on his chest of drawers for him to look at before I went to bed, because it had to be there when he came in the house.

Speaker 1:

So smart was not an option. In fact, my mama was a perfectionist and, yes, I loved her. But you know, it's hard to live up to perfection. It's hard to always hear oh, you only made a 99. What happened to that other one? You didn't do the extra credit, why not? It's hard to live up to a perfectionist, but I thought that was what I was supposed to do, but smart seemed to divide me away from the people who looked like me. So I didn't really want to do that. So I kind of thought that was a dirty name and my dad told me that I came home in the seventh grade and told him I wasn't going to be smart anymore. You know, our words affect us greatly, because I did not realize until after I graduated from college that I actually tried to make that come true and thank God it's a natural gift for me. So I couldn't not be smart, but I sure did try to dumb myself down because I wanted to fit in. And you know it wasn't that the other black kids weren't smart. I now understand that gifted and talented classes were really a way to make sure that the white kids got the best work. So they were prepared for college. Because I know that there were other smart. They were prepared for college because I know that there were other smart, gifted and talented black children. So why weren't they in gifted and talented classes?

Speaker 1:

It's not that we don't see the same thing today. You have to now still push your way in. You have to push your way into I think they call them AG classes now. You have to push your way into IB, international Baccalaureate classes in high school and you have to depend on counselors to help you get there, or parents have to be really involved to push their way to get their child recognized as smart enough to do these things. Do you know how many parents don't know that? They don't know that they can advocate to move their child forward? It's important, it's just important. There are still so many places to divide us.

Speaker 1:

So now when I talk about things, I have people come back to me especially white people, because that's who I went to school with most of the time come back and say you were always the smartest kid in the class, you always knew the answers, you always had your work done. And now I go okay, it's okay to be smart. I like being smart. I don't think of myself that way as a way to be above others, but I appreciate the fact that I am. I appreciate the opportunities that it gives me.

Speaker 1:

But I also recognize that just about everybody is smart at something. It might not be book learning. It might be how to cook. It might be how to run av production. It might be how to do software. It might be how to fix a car. It might be how to listen to the sound of an engine and say, oh, that's such and such that you need to get fixed. It might be knowing where to dig the right hole to put that big pipe that helps to run the sewer system.

Speaker 1:

Everybody's got a smart. It's not a bad name. I am embracing being called smart. You need to embrace it too. You need to figure out where your smart piece is and you need to take that thing and run with it. We've all got a gift. We've all got a gift and we don't always recognize it, because sometimes other people ridicule what our gift is and they don't recognize the importance of you having that gift. That was your spirit gift, that wasn't theirs, and so they don't have to recognize it. But you do. Don't tell your gift, your smart piece, that it's not worth having Because it is. It really is. You know what? You keep your smart self talking loud. Don't be quiet, no more. You've been listening to Quiet no More, where I share my journey, so you can be quiet.