Dear readers: Bramhall Square elucidates BY CAITLIN SHETTERLY

I am grateful for the opportunity to open up my life in the pages of "Bramhall Square" and, personal attacks aside, I am equally grateful for the feedback of readers and the opportunity to learn from them. That being said, I would like to take the time and space this week to respond to and clarify some important issues brought up by my recent column, "American Dreams" (July 8).

The facts of the incident most in question: The Y offers scholarship members half-price classes. The class costs $3 (not $5 as I thought at the time), $1.50 for scholarship members, not the $2.50 that I was offering the employee. He told me that I was 50 cents short. In his defense, there seems to be a gap in the Y’s procedure, as it seems there’s no way for a clerk to verify scholarship members (as I had already had my ID scanned at the front desk). But it was his rudeness and aggressive manner that caused offense and had me leaving in tears. For both the gap in procedure and the incident of rudeness the Y has apologized.

Now, when I left the Y that day, my first feeling was that I had been shamed publicly for having less money. Then a book by Marjorie Garber called Vested Interests came to mind. She talks in the book about how our brains make an immediate assertion based on gender and sexual persuasion the minute we see another person. This affects everything from our body language to speech to how we smile at that person. I was thinking about how it’s also true that our brain asserts race and class and how these things also affect how we interact with another human being. Suddenly it occurred to me that maybe race was a motivator, not class, in this unfortunate incident at the Y.

My last column could have been about bad manners, and that would have been something worth discussing. However, I chose to take on the very difficult topic of race’s role in interpersonal encounters. Judging from the letters I’ve received, it has been illustrated that we are culturally still very uncomfortable and unsure when trying to have a frank discussion about racism on the interpersonal level.

I write a bi-weekly column about my personal life, with the hope of creating a thread of common interest with my readership. This is intended to be entertaining, funny, and I hope to take on some of the harder issues of the day. I have no illusions of this column being "newsworthy," or even some form of op-ed. But the personal essay, I think, is the ideal place to talk about many issues, including racism and classism.

After my column came out, two things happened that made me think more carefully about what I had written. First, your letters began to flood my inbox. Everything from notes telling me how one person’s son is white and routinely feels that the black kids on the basketball court won’t pick him for their teams because he’s white to letters calling me a racist. I took each one very seriously.

But what I took more seriously was the dialogue that was begun because of this incident with both the employee at the Y and at Wild Oats. They were both brave enough to tell me how they felt, what they felt I was trying to say, and how they reacted to it, and all of us learned how to be better to each other. The most ironic thing is that they are and remain good friends. And instead of hating me, or calling me a racist, they wanted to discuss what had happened and why. One even said, "Look, you’re just trying to talk about stuff no one talks about up here."

Caitlin Shetterly can be reached at bramhallsquare@phx.com. Please see "Letters" for reaction to "American Dreams."