Home > Gwinnett > Rick Badie / My Opinion > Archives > 2006 > March > 30
Thursday, March 30, 2006
Pair don’t rise to cab ‘driver’s’ race bait
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
They asked the taxicab driver to take them to a restaurant that came highly recommended.
Cheryl Sadoti and Paige Hilliard Powers of Gwinnett settled into the back seat. Suddenly, the white cab driver launched into a tirade about Arabs. He said he despised them and wished they’d go back to where they’d come from.
Sadoti and Powers, in Savannah for a meeting of the Georgia Association of Realtors, didn’t bite.
“I have Arabs that are agents in my office, and they are wonderful people,” said Powers of Snellville. “So you just can’t say all Arabs are bad.”
Sadoti chimed in.
“I am married to a Sicilian,” the Suwanee woman said, “and if everybody was sent back, I wouldn’t have my three precious children.”
Strange cab driver. Stranger conversation.
All caught on hidden cameras and microphones. In truth, the driver was an actor hired by ABC News. The network was doing a segment to see how fares in New Jersey and Savannah would react when confronted with racist slurs.
John Quinones, an anchorman for ABC’s “Primetime,” had been in a panel truck trailing the taxi that February night in Savannah. When the cab stopped, he told the befuddled women what was up.
My guess is the producers chose a Southern city in hopes of capturing blatant racism. What they taped in Savannah was no more profound than what transpired in Jersey.
Down South, though, they did strike gold with a white male who fit the role of a “Deliverance” extra.
“Well, I like to go target hunting, you know — Mexicans, Puerto Ricans,” he told the white cabbie.
In the four days of the taxicab test, “Primetime” picked up 49 passengers. Only seven challenged the drivers’ racist diatribes, according to a story posted on the ABC News’ Web site.
Two of them were Powers and Sadoti.
“I just expressed what my mommy and daddy taught me,” said Sadoti, a North Carolinian who oversees the Duluth office of Keller Williams Realty Atlanta Partners. “We are a country of opportunity. Some people take advantage of it and run with it. Others don’t, no matter what the color of their skin or heritage.”
Powers, an Atlanta native, manages Keller Williams’ North Gwinnett office. Colleagues of Arab descent tearfully thanked her after the segment aired. A black male real estate agent told her she’d made him proud.
“I said what was in my heart,” Powers told me. “I am who I am.”
The segment that featured them — “Dealing with Racist Cabbies” — aired last Thursday. You can watch a Web cast of it online at ABCNews.go.com/Primetime. I missed it when it came on TV. Gwinnett County Sheriff Butch Conway didn’t. He was so touched by the women’s response that he called to tell me about it. See, Southerners get sick and tired of seeing their home branded racist. Sure, you can find it here. We don’t hold the patent on it, yet the stereotype, sometimes self-inflicted, festers.
So we react with pride when, in racist situations, people respond like Powers and Sadoti. Cameras or no cameras. They spoke from the heart.
The morning after the segment ran, Conway sent Powers, a friend, some flowers. He also called her and left a message to say he was bursting with pride.
That makes two of us.
