Have you ever been discriminated against?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Perhaps some of you would not be comfortable sharing such experiences, but I think it would be beneficial for all of us to be reminded that some people live with discrimination in some form almost daily.

I can honestly say that I can’t think of a single instance for myself. I am a white male of average height and weight, and I have always been a good athlete, so I definitely did not stick out enough to get picked on.

A simple yes or no would suffice, but I would hope that details could be shared so that we all might guard against these behaviors, some that we might not be aware are offensive.

2

Um…yes.

I always tell this story, but:

We lived in TN for a while. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great state - to visit. While you visit they go out of their way to make you feel at home.

So we moved there, after a visit. It was awful. We are E. Indian, and it was made very clear that we were not welcome. I had no friends in school after six months except one little girl who was half-black, I think. My mother was completely ostracized at work by everyone except the head nurse. My father can’t speak English very well, so people made fun of him right to his face. :mad:
Suffice it to say I will never mouth anywhere south in the States as long as I live.

NY isn’t very racist, but I still get the very occasional feeling. The worst was not too long ago, at a pizza joint that will remain Unnamed. Everyone around was served and paid attention to but us…we were the only non-whites in the entire room.

And there is a garden place around here that started out fairly surly to my boyfriend (Chinese) and very neutral to me (E. Indian). However, we don’t give up so easily anymore, and once they got to know us a little they were much nicer.

I’ve been lucky, and haven’t had that many outright incidents. When the Chinese wouldn’t return our spy plane my boyfriend got a lot. Someone scratched up his car, and there were mystery notes left. I wanted to grab them and throttle them while screaming, “Do you think he’s got the damn plane in his closet?!”

3

ME–seven year old white female

Discriminator–elderly man who ran a flea market stand down the road who angrily refused to sell me a pop-gun set because “that’s a boy’s toy! whatsamatter wich you? Aintcho a nice girl?”

Sounds stupid, but at the time I was fiercely upset over it. It was the first time (and luckily one of very few) that someone insisted that my gender somehow limited me.

4

So am I, but I did get discriminated against anyway. I was applying for temporary work at an employment agency and back then computer skills were pretty rare. One good job for someone with both computer and people skills was being a secretary. I’ve worked successfully as such to everyone’s content more than a few times, and it is certainly one of the best paying temp-jobs you can get.

Twice however the employment agency offered me to a company that refused me based on my gender. The employment agency didn’t want to lose these clients, even though this was against the law for them to refuse me, and I was too young to care enough to want to sue them or anything, plenty of other people that wanted to have me and from the reviews I got (I got a silver pin and even won a painting from Herman Brood), I think it was very much their loss.

Still, it was incredibly silly.

Conversely, once I was hired by a company and at this department I worked, in the 12 years of its existence not a single man had worked there as a secretary, but conversely the only other staff were all men, except recently a PR lady. Everytime I answered the phone, clients would start discussing their business details and I had to remind them I was just a secretary, where everytime another (female) secretary answered the phone they would ask to speak to someone in particular.

Understandable as their prejudice in this case was, for 12 years, correct, but it makes you aware of what kind of things are at play …

5

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention: one of the silly excuses such a company gave not to hire me was “we have bad experience with men”. Yeah right.

6

I am an overweight white male. I didn’t get a job as a waiter once because I didn’t have the “look” (IE: they wanted someone who wasn’t overweight) they were looking for. I had experience, had even helped open another store in another location as a cook and I knew the menu backwards & forwards. Luckily it was only for a part time job while my wife was home after the baby.

7

When I was just out of college, the economy was pretty bad and there weren’t a lot of jobs. I called every temp agency in the phone book and had one response that still stays with me. Whoever answered the phone at Snelling and Snelling interrupted me introducing myself and asked How fast do you type?. I responded that I wasn’t looking for a typing job, and she said in a nasty tone, We don’t have any need for a woman who can’t type. Needless to say, in the time I spent in front offices anything from them was directly round filed.
I was also once fired for being a lesbian. Only I wasn’t a lesbian.

8

Oh God, yes. Not in recent history but growing up in Northern Quebec was a non-stop headache. I still remember one of my earliest birthday parties at school where only 1 set of parents, they were Americans, let their kid come to my birthday party. The rest of them warmed up over the next couple of years but the egging of our house + Go Home Nigger shaving cream graffiti never really stopped and my parents could rarely find someone willing to come over and baby-sit the little ethnic kids.

Funny you should mention TN, Aanamika…I have a friend of South Asian descent who had the same experience (the 80s) before moving to the West Coast.

9

Yup. I’m part white and part Cree indian. I’m very pale, so I’ve been not believed about my heritage and called a “wannabe” from people in the Native community, and I’ve had white people laugh at my Indian name and/or some of the traditional spiritual beliefs I have. It sucks, being on the fence.

10

White male here. I can think of a few instances of discrimination off the top of my head. I undoubtedly missed out on admissions and scholarships to elite colleges due to my race (I could have really used the money.) I used to work for a Japanese company (in the U.S.), and they never gave non-Japanese any authority or responsibility. Once a guy asked when any American would be made a project leader, and our Japanese manager replied without the slightest hesitation, “Never.” Then when I went to graduate school, a professor of foreign extraction told me, regarding American students, “They don’t want to work!” Also, after having spent a couple of years in the department, a professor I had never met came up to me cautiously in one of the labs and asked, “Are you…a graduate student in this department?” See, I was the only American in the department, so I stuck out a little.

Has discrimination ever worked in my favor? Undoubtedly. But that’s another thread.

11

Yes.

I am a female and I was 21 at the time. I joined the local volunteer fire department, I was the first female to join, but I didn’t know that until I actually did become a member. Me and the other new members were sent to the county firefighting school and I worked my hardest to pass the classes, I got the highest scores of the entire class. A few months later we had a working fire, in all the gear, it was hard to tell who was who, someone grabbed me to go inside the building and help with the hose. Everything was going well when the battaion cheif looked at my face and saw that it was me, he immediatly sent me out of the building and sent a less expeirenced member in. Later when I asked why I was ordered out, I was told that it was because he didn’t think that a girl was strong enough to handle the hose.

I still have to deal with it today. My son is a Young Marine. and I am a staff member with them. The CO is an old fashioned guy, I guess. On staff, we have three very dependable women, who get the job done, but he also had three very lazy men who don’t do the things that they are supposed to do and you never know if they are going to show up or not. One of the guys disappear for months at a time without telling anyone when he’ll be back, he the second in command. We’ve discussed this with the CO a number of times, but he flat out, will not replace these guys with any of the dependable women.

12

Well, I’m currently seriously underemployed, and I know people who have no more library experience than I have gotten jobs, probably because they’re older and look more mature and responsible. Some of them have experience in other areas, and some of them don’t have experience in anything but having babies (which I realize is an important job but does not make you a better cataloger.) So age discrimination does work both ways.

13

Yes I have, applied to work at a uniform store, and the female manager flat-out said, “You can go ahead and fill out an application, but we never hire men to work for us” :eek:

Slight hijack: At one of the jobs I work, most of the people that work there are high school students, and most of the ones that get hired are honor students/overachievers. However, as an average student that shoehorned my way into the job, I witnessed first hand that academic performance in high school has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on job performance; in fact some of the best students, people who were valedictorians, etc were some of the most arrogant, lazy, backstabbing sons of bitches I have ever had the pleasure to work with :wally

14

Applying for a county job, doing digital mapping with mathematics background in a CIS set-up back in the early 90s. The top 10% whose test scores (math intensive), would move on to the second interview process. I scored in the top 5%, but being a white male, I was informed AFTERWARDS that there was a racial based quota that had to be met and that my application would be put on file and reconsidered when these quotas were met.

Uh, that was 13-14 years ago… :rolleyes:

Now instead, I’m just another white male business owner (aka: The Man)…ironic.

I owe it all to discrimination. Naw…I owe it all to hard work, risk and determination.

15

For my nationality - multiple times in Germany (I’m English).

The worst was a university professor who knocked my grade down from a 1 to a 3. This was on a group project which it was not possible to judge individually, which was not language-based, and on which I had the most prior experience. One of the others from the group left after two months and destroyed all our work in a hissy fit - and she got a 1. Since this was a triple-weighted course, this grade made the difference between a 1st and a 2:1, which is important since I was planning on an academic career.

My nationality was the only characteristic that set me apart from the other students, and she also once showed us a film she had made, about Norther ireland. It was one of the worst documentaries I’d ever seen - it included amateur fraud such as using images from the 1970s, with soldiers standing on the streets, alongside subtitles and dialogue claiming this was happening today. I can only assume I lost the marks because I was British.

It still grates on me, obviously. One day when I’m rich I’m going to find that woman and ask her why she felt justified ruining someone’s life just because they were English.

For my sexuality - missed a promotion at work. Got reported to social services because my having a child didn’t fit in with my ‘lifestyle.’ Social services found that the school had no reason to report me whatsoever, they found numerous homophobic references in the report, and advised me to make a complaint against the school.

Have had violence threatened against me, catcalls, things thrown at me and so on, because I’m gay, but that’s not exactly ‘discrimination,’ and it hasn’t happened much. I’ve been fairly lucky, especially the last year or so.

I’ve seen people of African and Afro-Carribean heritage get preferential treatment where I work, but given that I also saw precisely the opposite happening before the new person started hiring, it’s understandable.

I’m living in England now and most of the time my sexuality is invisible, so I don’t think my experiences are equivalent to, say, British Asians or Africans. But it still happens.

16

In elementary school, there was a playground that was off limits to the middle schoolers (6th-8th grade). I was a big kid in 5th grade (I’m now 6’5"), and one day the teacher monitoring the playground threw me off the playground, and wouldn’t believe me when I told her I was in 5th grade. I eventually had to get my own teacher to tell this twit what grade I was in. She never apologized either.

17

I have gotten my share of catcalls, insults, and threats, but I haven’t really suffered much in the way of discrimination, in the sense that most people are mentioning in this thread. I’ve had to put up with some homophobic comments at work, but I’ve never really been deprived of anything economic for being a big 'mo. (This may be partially because translation is apparently right up there with floristry and the priesthood for average Kinsey rating.)

A number of my exes have been discriminated against. Example. My ex Éric, for another example, was once fired from his job on false charges of theft that his homophobic manager drummed up; they had video, which he saw, proving he didn’t steal a cent, so they just fired him instead of having him arrested. :rolleyes:

For another view, I know of two trans people, both of whom were arrested in Grand Central Station in New York, one for using the bathroom that corresponded to their assigned gender, one for using the bathroom of their gender of identification. So there’s a pretty basic one…

18

My father, myself, and my son in Chattanooga, TN. It was different. I was really hurt by it wondering what I did, outside of being white, to cause this nastiness. I got over it pretty fast though, since we were merely passing through and I knew I wouldn’t have to deal with it forever, so that was nice.

Very bizarre and sad.

19

I have; I’ve been protested and demonstrated against.

20

Picket signs for your wicked rhymes?