Their only “suffering” is entirely self inflicted and stems from their own moral failings.
Their “agony” at being forced to watch a person of color performing a needed service for them is without rational basis.
Calling a racist person’s hatred of someone else “pain” or “suffering” or “agony” is not justified. It is hatred, and should simply be treated as such.
The only person who has a justifiable right to be uncomfortable in this situation is the poor cleaning lady who is in a situation where she is cleaning for someone who clearly hates her based only on the color of her skin.
I was wondering where the harm was, too. And then I found the actual court decision which has information that wasn’t in any of the articles, including the fact that Chaney hasn’t actually won her case yet, ( the district court’s granting of summary judgement to the nursing home was overturned and the case is remanded for further proceedings ), that Chaney was in fact fired and she claims that it was for racially motivated reasons, and that Chaney claimed that the patient preference policy created a hostile work environment including racial comments made by coworkers.
I’ve had experience with something similar. I used to drive a van to transport wheelchair clients, including a lot of folks in nursing homes.
Sometimes the clients or families would ask the company not to send black drivers. The requests were met with a blanket refusal, not just because of the discriminatory aspect, but because there was no way they could rearrange the schedule to guarantee anybody a white driver, or a driver of any specific color. In order to get the work done, and remain profitable, they had to schedule trips with the available drivers on shift.
I suspect that there’s no way to consistently schedule staff at most nursing homes to guarantee no black staff caring for particular clients. I just don’t think it’s practical. Someone calls in sick, takes vacation, quits on short notice, has an on the job injury. When you have to staff, you staff with whom you have available.
If you can find me a mid range nursing home in the lowland south that doesn’t have a substantially black staff, well, I’ll take my hat off to you, because it won’t be easy.
As the owner or manager of such a facility, I’d just refuse any such requests. It’s hard enough to keep fully staffed and provide quality care as it is. Why add on irrelevant extras that might get you sued?
That makes a lot more sense. In this case, the business certainly discriminated against a worker because of race. I wouldn’t think the law is applied if a customer/patient displayed racism, or, at the very minimum, it would be a civil suit not a civil rights suit.
You do know that some of your hypotheticals aren’t racism and some are right?
Even so, if I don’t like a mechanic at my dealership, I can ask to have someone else work on my car or I can take it somewhere else. If I say I don’t want any niggers touching my car and they say OK we will have this white guy over here fix your car. Is that OK?
No, the case where the company pleads that they were merely implementing the racist preferences of their customers—which is the fact pattern here—has been roundly rejected as a defense to the creation of a hostile work environment. The policy of the law is to discourage and disincentivize racial discrimination. And you are right, we cannot legislate individual feelings. But we can, do, and in my opinion should, have legislation that forbids all businesses from indulging racist preferences and to the greatest extent possible, extirpate such “product features” (lily-white staff, Jew-free country club) from the marketplace.
No, racism is not a mental disease, but obsessions to the point of extreme agitation can be symptoms of mental diseases. It’s not the sour old bigot that kvetches about the darkies that I’m concerned about, but the Alzheimer’s-afflicted senior who experiences genuine (if groundless) terror if tended by a person they perceive as a threat. I don’t see the value in antagonizing them just to prove a point about racial equality.
However, if the business panders to the racist by firing black staff workers, and if the business institutes a racist patient preference policy to the extent that they create a hostile work environment which includes racial comments made by coworkers( as has been claimed in the lawsuit)…
Then perhaps the business should be taken to task for improper practices, or perhaps they should seriously consider telling racist clients to shut the hell up or find a new home.
I think this is what has been missing from this discussion so far: businesses should not give in to the demands of a racist customer. If the existing policy (all patient demands will be accommodated), no matter how innocent it seems, is used to support a racist demand, then the policy must be changed.
You keep saying this as though the racist individual is operating in a vaccuum. The choice is not, “Do we try to teach this racist a lesson, or do we pander to him?” The choice is, “Do we pander to this racist, or do we protect our employees – who, coincidentally, also have feelings and what not – and refuse to create an absurd working environment for the sake of someone’s paranoia?”
If catering to a racist request had no impact on anyone, you might have an argument (leaving the morality of such a decision aside). But, as been pointed out in this thread, such a policy has a potentially negative impact on the employees, from a personal standpoint, as well as the business’s operations and bottom line. If someone is going to end up upset/hurt/angry either way, my vote remains for the racist.
Keep in mind that Ireland was pretty much the whitest country in the world until the last two decades or so - I never asked my Granny when she met her first black person, but she was probably mid-50 to 60s (I think I was 12/13 when I met mine). And while Ireland always had a small Chinese community, she had probably never met a Philipeno in her life before that moment.
So her racist tendencies were not mollycoddled all her life - there was never a reason to face them. It is kinda hard to explain to an American, but for someone of her generation someone like that would have looked completely different from the norm.
When the only interaction you have had with black people is helping raise money to feed the starving ‘little black babies’ until you are already considered old, when you remember a time before cars or even electricity, when you remember that walking down the street every single face was white and that was the way the world was because black people lived in Africa, then being pawed by a big black nurse can scare the life out of you.
Don’t get me wrong, I worked in a hospital and most of the older patients got accustomed very quickly to foreign nurses (I got a few funny moments from them) but there were always a (rare) few who, at the age of eighty with their body failing, could not get used to having black nurses touch them or wash them, and trembled when they tried.
Normally the nurse did the decent thing and waited for another nurse whom the patient would trust.
Old people often genuinely have trouble adapting to new realities - not every old person can be a cool hip granny.
My Granny gave me money when I was 17 “to bring a girl to the dance”:rolleyes:.
When my mother tried to set her up with a widower we knew, not romantically but just so they could keep each other company, she refused to even go for a walk with him because she was afraid of what the neighbours would think - she couldn’t grasp that all anyone would want these days was for her not to be lonely on her own.
It caused her real stress to have that strange woman in her home, a woman whose face she couldn’t read and whom she didn’t know how to talk to due to the culture barrier.
It doesn’t matter that you may not have liked her opinions or prejudices, she was a lovely woman, a good person, and a good friend to those around her; she would not have deserved to have her life shortened by the stress caused by the unwanted touching of someone she didn’t trust.
Please don’t take pleasure in the fear of an old lady who has since died.
Your granny had never met a Filipino person in her life before the moment that one was hired to clean her house… Yet her reaction was to “follow the woman from room to room to keep an eye on her”.
It would seem that she had a negative opinion about Filipino’s even though she’s never met one. Is this the reaction of a person who is frightened? She had stress from “unwanted touching?” When did the cleaning lady touch her? She didn’t like the cleaning ladies face? Perhaps your lovely Grandma could have simply not followed the cleaning lady around then.
And when was she “pawed by a big black nurse”? In fact, when was anyone “pawed by a big black nurse”? Was this in the OP? No? What’s that about? Do nurses usually “paw” people?
Sorry, the description did not strike me as a person with mental illness. Perhaps xenophobia could be excused, but that would be a simple fear of strangers. Following someone from room to room to “keep an eye on her” does not sound like fear to me - it sounds like she thought that all Fillipinos were thieves.
But the anecdote also describes the grandmother as “terrified” and “almost in tears”. I’m not claiming and have never claimed the reaction was justifiable, but I don’t see this kind of accommodation as an upending of decades of civil-rights advancements, either.
In fact, the kinds of impatience I’m seeing in this thread seems perfectly akin to demanding that crazy people could get over it, if they really wanted to.
Let’s say someone with Alzheimer’s or another form of dementia has genuine terror when placed in the presence of a black person. OK. Let’s say we have enough white nursing staff to accomodate this person. However, what do we do with all the black patients that live on the ward? Do we have to create some kind of buffer around that terrorized demented person–a black-free zone of sorts? How practical is this? And do the doctors, some of whom might be black or black-looking (like Indians) have to stay away from this patient too?
I say we treat them as decently as we can, without going overboard. That means if we can get a white nurse without inconveniencing everyone else, give them the white nurse. It also means that if the white nurse isn’t available, then they can’t complain if they’re left in a dirty diaper for an extra twenty minutes. Maybe that’ll learn 'em. But how can you reason with a demented person? It doesn’t work that way.
All I can say is that I’m glad I’m not in a situation where I’d be affected by this. Because it would suck to be the nurse of the “wrong” color, and it would also suck for the “right” color nurse. What if she’s one of a few on her floor? She might have more work to do than the other nurses, and that’s not fair.