Gilda

That's what I heard from a colleague today.

This afternoon, I was having lunch in the faculty lounge and another professor referred to me as a "a member of the WASP brigade." I, very reasonably I thought, said that I wasn't a WASP. The person making the original statement said I quite obviously was.

I said, "I think I know my ancestry better than you do," followed by his insistence that there was no need to get uptight about it, but why deny the obvious? Everyone can see that I'm about as WASPy as a person can get.

I said that I'm Ukrainian and Irish, and I'm not a protestant, therefore I am not a WASP.

He said, "There's no need to get bitchy about it."

So wait, you say something stupid, get called on it, get proven wrong, and your response is to call me a bitch? What are you, twelve?

Maybe I'm being a little unreasonable to expect better behavior than this from university faculty, I don't know, but since when did correcting someone's obvious mistake become a reason for hostility? I wonder if he'd react the same way if he called Dr. KGB Chinese and she corrected him, insisting that no, she was obviously Chinese, and correcting his mistake was being an uptight bitch.

It's idiotic stuff like this that makes me avoid the faculty lounge.

Is it being unreasonable or uptight to correct someone who makes an obvious mistake like this? I wasn't offended at the original statement, I just prefer that an accurate label be used, and thought the follow up insistence that he was right and I was wrong about my own religion and ancestry was at best a little strange and at worst obnoxious.

What do you think? Would I be better off just staying quiet in such a situation?

__________________
I'm against ending blackness. I believe that everyone has a right to be black, it's a choice, and I support that.

~Steven Colbert