Of course, I don’t know all of the facts, and I may be full of poo, so I apologize for giving you the benefit of my ignorance on this issue.
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Generally speaking “Customer preference” is not a defense to discrimination except in the rare case where a person, by necessity, has their body intimately handled, as in a nursing home.
However, no employee in your scenario of steering the antisemitic customer towards the non-Jewish rep suffered an adverse employment action. As long as that continues to be the case – the jewish rep is not passed over for promotions, bonuses, or any other benefit of employment due to their jewishness – steering is basically fine. OTOH If it causes the employee to suffer an adverse employment action, it isn’t fine at all.
Other than the nursing home, else has lost using customer preference as a defense.
When I was with the Legal Aid Society I had a client (the equivalent of a customer) who was covered with neo-Nazi tattoos. He qualified for LAS services, though, and had pretty clearly been ripped off by a used-car dealership. I sued the dealership and represented him to the best of my ability… but I also was careful not to talk politics with him. He actually seemed like a nice guy.
I’d be curious if this is different from an employment issue. Would the company make a point of placing an Orthodox Jewish student with an Orthodox family or a Muslim student with a Muslim family? I mean part of the purpose of student exchange programs (although that’s not what the OP has) is to learn about a new culture. Perhaps they should have told the student to suck it up and go where they are being placed; if there are subsequent issues, the placement can be re-evaluated.
Were you ever able to transfer a customer with that attitude to a female supervisor? That’d be the first thing I’d do.
I’ve ran across this problem several times in the various customer service jobs I’ve had both as drone and as supervisor. Luckily for me, company policy, and/or supervisor policy was to politely decline to accomodate such an unreasonable request and to offer a referral to another company if this was not acceptable.
You *appear *to be casting aspersions on the teacher, here, for not being someone who “can control a classroom that has students with mental/anger issues”. It’s not a question of not being able to control them - it’s a question of this kid being completely out of line. You can have the best control of your classroom that anyone ever had ever, but if one kid is so far out of control that he’s outright to your face going to call you a “dumb white bitch”, that kid is the problem, not the teacher. He needs to learn not to speak to people like that, that it’s not all about his “rights” or what a special flower he is. If he’s seriously mentally ill enough not to be able to learn how to behave in society, he shouldn’t be in school at all.
You guys seem to forget that as members of the protected minority, the kid and his parents have the upper hand.
If the school’s staff doesn’t walk softly enough on egg shells, they will be the ones who find themselves out on the street.
Yeah, that was the problem when I worked at the small, ultraliberal university.
White student caught with a ludicrously small amount of Marijuana = suspended.
Black student caught multiple times with several different hard drugs, beats up a white student and steals his laptop, trespasses multiple times, beats up his child’s mother = “Stop picking on him” (to Security)
Black Security officer refuses to wear the American flag on his uniform = they remove it from all Security uniforms. Same guy considers ALL white people to be racist = everyone he suspects to be racists suspected of being racist. Same guy does zero work = no action taken. “He might sue us”
This “protected class” bullshit is just that, unequal before the law and should be unconstitutional.
Every “protected class” except for age includes every person.
If the schools staff feel they have to walk on eggshells it’s because they are racist to begin with so in my opinion the laws working.
I don’t know why ‘treat everyone equally regardless of race’ is such a hard concept for people to follow. If you treat everyone the same when allegations of racism arise it should be pretty easy to brush them aside with the facts.
A business that accommodates racists customers is going to find themselves in a poor legal position. Accommodating one or two probably isn’t going to make a large enough dent in their employment pool but accommodating every bigot that walks in the door is going to lead to a very poor minority representation. Best to just send racists packing whether they be employees or customers.
When I delivered pizza, I delivered to an older “gentleman” (who could’ve quite probably been a WWII or Korean war vet. He said he was glad I had delivered his order, instead of the “Japs” that usually work delivery jobs. (My alias AWB is more than just my initials; it stands for “average white boy” 
) Though I was personally disgusted by his attitude, I took his generous tip and left.
When I got back to the store, I told the regular assistant manager, Tom - a Japanese-American man - about the comments of the customer. He just smiled and went into the customer’s computer record. He made the notation that for his next order, he (Tom) would make sure to do the delivery, putting on his best over-stereotypical Oriental accent (he had none otherwise). Not sure if he ever put it to the test, though.
Thread moved to IMHO.
Let me explain. I work at an alternative ed. center. Kids who are expelled or dropouts come here to work on their credits and either go back to their home schools or graduate. We’re contracted with the district. It’s sort of a…dumping ground. We’re the last stop, but it is very very very very very hard to remove a student from our program.
And even if I were in a typical public school, I couldn’t remove a kid for being racist or calling me a name.
Private, no union, no option. 
I have bills to pay. On top of that, I love my job, my students, my work and I think what I do is important. <sigh>
But if it had come to that, I most certainly would’ve raised hell.
We…don’t have that option…and even when I was in a public school, I still didn’t have that option. MAYBE there would be a one day in-school suspension.
MAYBE.
In our center, there are 40 kids, 4 teachers, 45 computers. They each have their own classes on the computer (plus extras that we give them) and each teacher has 10 kids to set up classes for/grade. Honestly, about 50 per cent of it is behavior management. I happen to have three students with IEPs, so they get a lot of my 1:1 time. I have kids who are at a 2nd grade reading level and about the same for math…and they’re in secondary school.
Also, in my area, the ‘gangbanger’ type kids self-segregate. Sometimes I can’t figure out who they dislike more: member of ______ race, or their white teachers.
These things happen all the time at my school. Of course, I’m not getting the creme de le creme. I had one girl told me to shut the fuck up and back the fuck off repeatedly and so forth and so on. I stayed calm and stuck to my guns. Now I’m her favorite teacher. Can’t win 'em all over, but I think that discipline and consistency and a principle of fairness helps.
With this kid, though - ugh. He’s just an angry mental mess. And I think his mother is a) not quite complete in the head cognitively or b) on crack.
I agree. Too often in schools -traditional or alternative- there aren’t consequences for that behavior. But you’d be surprised the racist and ethnocentric shit that comes out of the kids’ mouths.
Thank you for the back-up. I was prepared to send him home for the day - that’s an immediate truancy - but after our ‘talk’ and him finally agreeing (grudgingly) that I am doing my job and not picking on him, I let him stay. It was actually up to the director/boss (he serves an admin role but he’s a licensed teacher), but he said, “It’s up to you, Miss R.” And so I told him he could stay, figuring that it would do us both better for me to have a little bit of mercy.
There’s a lot of assumptions about who can and cannot teach properly based on ethnic background. I work in urban ed. It’s a given that a minority teacher (especially male) is assumed to be a better teacher and have better classroom management than a white one - so much so that some districts actively recruit minority teachers because they think they can teach minority students better. And I actually witnessed a PARENT come in (drugged up) and say something like: “Don’t you be treatin my kid like he a thug. He ain’t no thug. You white teachers always be thinking _____ is a thug and you treat him bad!”
So sometimes I wonder if my boss thinks I, a female white girl from the midwest, may not have the right stuff to teach “this kind” of population. So far, I’ve done fine, but admittedly, I’ve worked with mostly Latino students.
My boss is A LOT easier on certain kids than I am. For me, rules is rules. I mean, if you are ‘bumpin’ to your iPod’ during class and you KNOW there’s a zero tolerance policy with electronics, I’m going to confiscate it. I mean, get real. You are sixteen years old and you’re testing me. But my boss is more likely to tell the kid to put it away three times. He is the one with bad behavior management. The place is a zoo if a couple of choice staff aren’t ‘on top of it’.
This is the type of thing I’ve seen (though it’s Latino v. black). I think it’s kind of a racist mentality, though, like someone’s gotta “doing the black kid a favor” or “whitey gotta save the soul” or some b/s.
In high schools with white-dominated staff, minority kids (and boys) are likely to be punished more severely than white kids. The same is true for the correctional system. Even lighter skinned black people get lighter sentences.
But racism, ethnocentricism, and all around ignorance isn’t limited to just the white folk. In some places, racial tension is very high. And when even otherwise liberal minds can be polite with company, you’ll still hear stuff like “our kind” and “your race” or whatever.
I don’t mean to threadshit; sorry if I did.
When I worked the front desk in a real estate office, I learned very early on to refer any walk-in customers with Arab clothing or yarmakas to a male sales agent. I know, not all Jewish and/or Muslim people have qualms about working with women, but it was still more polite not to have to make them ask for a man.
That’s my understanding as well. Its one of those things that CYA legal departments discourage giving into on a small scale - i.e. you won’t find Friday’s meeting your request for a “white waiter” as a matter of policy. But when you are talking about assigning someone to manage an account - you want to make sure that the relationship is good. So your wealthy client is going to find a wealth manger he can form a relationship with. Which means you might have to tread carefully if you assign accounts.
(Wealth managers tend to do their own “sales.” I wasn’t assigned mine by the bank - I hired her. If she were to leave and her accounts are reassigned to someone I don’t like, nothing stopping me from leaving.)
Why would they put the American flag on a school security officer’s uniform in the first place? Is patriotic “flair” some kind of job requirement for rent-a-cops?
I agree – it puts us in “Animal Farm” territory! “Some of us are ‘more equal’ than others”…
Nonsense. It would help if either of you had an understanding of what you are talking about instead of knee-jerk reverse racism bs.
The term does not apply to specific disadvantaged minorities, it details the criteria upon which you cannot discriminate.