My people, my people

F. Brett Cox reports that on this week's episode of Numb3rs, an artist at a comics convention surveyed the scene and said, "These are my people."

This was good for a laugh because Brett often has heard me sigh at science fiction conventions and say, "My people, my people" -- a phrase I lifted, no doubt tastelessly, from Zora Neale Hurston, who writes in Dust Tracks on a Road that the phrase "is forced outward by pity, scorn and hopeless resignation ... called forth by the observations of one class of Negro on the doings of another branch ..."