What's the worst case of racism/sexism/homophobia/etc. you've seen at work?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Over in this Pit thread, they’re discussing a woman who demanded a “white” delivery man. So it goes.

I’m a cashier in a discount store. Occasionally I’ll get a customer, usually Orthodox Jewish or Muslim, who asks for a male cashier. We also keep a guy around who can ring up purchases, and I’ve been told not to make a scene. The actual quote was “You have a right to think it. You don’t have a right to say it.”

OTOH, my Chassidic Jewish Boss has told people to express homophobic beliefs to “Please do not talk like that in this store.”

2

Co-worker was not happy with the unhelpful obstructionism of another guy on a different team…

CW: Ugh! In his last life, he was a woman!
pause
CW: Wow, that was kinda sexist.
Us: YA THINK? :dubious:

3

Recently, not much. I’m old enough to have seen stuff that would be unbelievable today.

“Women are too hormonal for management positions”

“Even the good ones steal”

“You can’t trust Jews, they stick together and stick it to you”

“There better not be any homos working here”

That used to be pretty mild stuff.

4

I am Roma. I am a librarian. A tenured faculty member has openly suggested that the reason certain very popular and expensive study guides were continually disappearing from my university library was that I was probably stealing them and reselling them.

5

Just recently we had a transgender truck driver make a delivery here. I was kind of disappointed in the reaction of some of my coworkers. Lots of gawking and some people calling other people in the plant so they could come over and gawk.

That’s just the most recent. Over the years I’ve seen just about every -ism.

6

I (a woman) was on a phone call with my business partner (a guy), the owner of an ad company (a guy) and one of the underlings at the ad company (a woman). Either I said something extremely useful or the other woman did, and the ad guy said “Boy Chris [my partner], we sure don’t give these girls enough credit, do we? Yuk yuk!”

Was one of those moments when we were surely all turning red behind our phones.

7

I didn’t personally witness this, but when a female coworker of mine was promoted our male supervisor made a “joke” about how it wouldn’t be easy to find a replacement with “as good a rack” as her’s.

8

There was one guy I used to work for. He was a long tenured GS, so he could get away with almost anything, and he really pushed that stuff. He’s morbidly obese, and he had some porn scattered around his office, and he’d take vacations at least a few times a year to Toronto or Tampa to partake of their prostitutes. Hell, he even flew in a Ukrainian woman, that everyone suspected was probably more or less a mail-order bride, and even brought her to work and “showed her off”. So, that can give you an idea of what his general opinion of women is. Let’s just pretend his name was Bob.

On one occasion, we had a very attractive early 30s woman working in the office. She was attractive enough that, frankly, several of the other men would make a point of walking by her cubicle and striking up a conversation whenever they could. Funny enough, apparently I was the only one that had enough self-restraint that they’d let do shift work with her. Regardless, Bob was one of those guys that would make a point of coming out of his office whenever he heard her around and would engage her in conversation, except he tended to do it in more of an elementary school type, where he’d just be mean and insulting to her. And his comments tended to revolve around how she dressed which, in my opinion, was always professional. Yet, if she was wearing a button-up shirt, and you could see even a hint of cleavage, he’d say so. If she was wearing slacks, he’d comment that he liked her ass. If she wore a skirt that showed any of her legs at all, he’d say so. It was quite appalling on it’s own, really, but she had a sharp tongue and would usually dish it back at him at least as harsh. I asked her about it at some point, and she said she didn’t care at all, she actually liked it gave her an excuse to hurl insults at him, and she was used to it anyway, since she moonlighted as a bartender. So nothing official ever came of that.

The worst one though, was several years later. After a reorganization, he had ended up under the supervision of a black, female Commander and she had the office next to hers. She was nice, perhaps a bit too much for her own good. I was up there in his office checking on a deployment of some of one of my projects because he’d complained it wasn’t working right for him–as it turned out, he was just expecting it to behave differently that it should, for reasons I didn’t understand. As I had used to work for him, he struck up a conversation about movies or something. Eventually the Commander had come over to ask some work related question and got into the conversation when some, let’s say controversial stuff, came up. Right there, in front of his black, female boss, he actually commented on both, how hormonal and bitch women get on their periods, and also, commenting on race, “well, you know how they [black people] are” with an obviously derisive tone in his voice. She actually completely ignored the sexist comment, perhaps she was used to it at that point. And her response to the racist one was just just “Oh Bob…” in a gee-shucks kind of way.

At one point someone else had tried to file a sexism and racism complaint against him. She was upset that she hadn’t gotten a particular project and blamed it on him for being sexist and racist, but as it turned out, he had nothing to do with that decision, and she hadn’t gotten it because of her incompetence, and was fired shortly later anyway. But the rumor had gotten around that someone had filed a sexism complaint and gotten fired for it. Similarly, he’d gotten another complaint too, telling someone he didn’t like that he was going to shoot him in the head, but as he was the only person that heard it, there was no evidence, and all they could do was move him to another section. Perhaps those two complaints coming to nothing scared people off from further complaints?

9

I’ve seen a few at work.

A secretary, commenting on how horrible “the blacks” are, they way they live, etc. Of course, she said, “our blacks” are different, but the rest of them, well, you know how they are.

A Jewish equity partner explaining to non-Jewish support staff the reasons why Jewish people are so much smarter than non-Jews. I have to say, his grasp of history did not make him look all that smart, but he was quite serious about this.

At the same firm, a receptionist who had a tiny little gold cross (not even a crucifix!) on a chain around her neck being asked (told, really) to remove or hide it because it was inappropriate at this firm.

Overhearing two senior partners discussing whether or not to make a promising senior associate a partner, and deciding that his “lifestyle issues” ruled out partnership for him (the associate in question was gay).

The office manager at the same firm refusing to allow a certain mail room guy to come above the lower floors (where the mail room was) because he was black and an ex-con. He was actually barred from most floors in the firm.

At a magazine, years back, being in a conference room discussing how to fill some empty positions, and the art director and managing editor and (if I remember right) VP of finance announcing that they insisted that the positions be filled with women. Men, no matter how qualified, were simply not to be considered.

10

Southern California here, I owned an interior design and products store. I used a few black installers. It was not unusual to have customers call and complain about them looking like hoodlums. None of them looked like hoodlums. If a robbery happened to happen within 6 months of one of my black installers being in their home they were often mentioned as suspects.

11

Many years ago my husband was passed over for a promotion because he’s gay.

12

My first job was in 1988, at an Arby’s. I was 15. My boss, the 20-something son of the franchise owner, was a proud Southern Baptist. A few of the things I personally observed:

  • Our cash registers were all programmed so that WITNESSING THE KING OF KINGS was printed on every receipt, right below the name of the restaurant and above the line items.
  • He handed Chick Tracts to employees and visitors alike. Since I was Mormon at the time, I got the one that slagged Mormonism. Several Catholic employees (Maryland is heavily Catholic) got the truly offensive anti-RCC ones.
  • He made a large, ostentatious show of putting on rubber gloves before handing a male gay couple their food. I’m ashamed to admit I found this funny at the time.
  • The term “sand nigger” made several ugly appearances.
13

A woman, a flaming lesbian and everyone had to know it, and I a man, applied for the same job as a chemical operator. I had 15 years of chemical operator experience as a stillman in an oil refinery and she had worked as a laborer in maintenance department at some company, yet she was hired one day before me at this new company. She eventually was fired and I retired 23 years later. Oddly she and I became friends over the years when she realized how little she knew about being an ‘operator’.

On the other hand, I guess the racism was on my part because while at the refinery we had 2 softball teams. I played on the second team. The guys that played on the first team were really, really good. REALLY good. My buddy Willy Johnson was black and was extremely fast so you know he played center field. But the thing about Willy was, I NEVER saw him get thrown out at first on an infield ground ball. I’m surer there must have been times that he was, but I never saw one. A few times I was asked to play up with them, or their game would be right after ours and I’d stick around to see them crush the other team as they hardly ever lost. BTW, All the guys on the first team came from the same neighborhood in Indiana and went the same high school, and just happened to be black.

Phu Cat

14

Phu Cat, if you said that stuff at work then you may have won the thread.

15

I had one coworker who was born in Romania. Perfectly pleasant woman, up until the moment when someone mentioned the Roma. Then we got long, loooooong rants about how they’re all crooks. Black people, Hispanic people, gay people, she was entirely accepting of, which just made the sudden hate all the more dramatic.

16

I’m 45 and spent the first 20 years of my career down south. I’ve heard every single possible permutation and combination of offensive and stupid phrases come out of people’s mouths in the workplace.

Now I just need to get certain team members out of the notion that I will schedule the meetings. The fact that I’m the only one who was born without a penis does not mean that I have some special kind of Outlook-fu that makes scheduling meetings fun and easy. I’m also not an admin assistant. You want a lunch set up, YOU SET IT UP. Also, get your own damn coffee.

Personally, I was told at my first job that I was hired because, if they were hiring someone who “didn’t know anything”, they wanted to hire the pretty one. Never mind that I had a college degree, nursing certification, and was a published writer by age 20. I was hired because I was pretty.

17

Tripolar, that was almost 30 years ago.

PC

18

Back when I was in high school, mid 80s, I worked as a cashier at a grocery store. All the other cashiers were women, the manager was a man.

There was some dust-up between a couple of the cashiers and one of them got demoted from shift supervisor. The manager held a meeting where he bemoaned the fact that he had to manage a buncha womenfolk, because given the chance, they’d just tear each other to shreds.

My little 16 year old self didn’t think much of it, but I know now how inappropriate that was.

19

About 20 years ago, I was leaving an IT position for a software development position in the same company. Part of the deal was I had to train my replacement before I could move on. I was in charge of the lab and had developed all the procedures myself, so it was easy to train my replacement. After four months, there was literally nothing I could do in the lab that she could not do just as well.

When it came time to hand off responsibility I introduced her to my east coast counterpart, a good-ol-boy from southern Virginia. Apparently his mind could not comprehend that a black female could be a Unix systems administrator. He did not talk to her, only to me. At one point I told him directly, “you need to tell her, not me, cause I’m a short-timer on this project”.

A week later I get called in to my boss, who tells me the program office has decided to supply their own IT personnel and could I please train them. I called bullshit and said the deal was for me to train a replacement, which I did. My replacement not being their preferred race or gender wasn’t my problem. My boss sighed and said “You saw through it, too, huh? I just wish we could prove it.” We decided to leave the program office high and dry. I and my replacement moved on to better positions.

Same company, but didn’t actually see it:

A black co-worker decided to move from California back to Virginia to be near his family. A former boss of ours had previously relocated to the Virginia site and was eager to snap him up. Boss gets told by the Hiring manager:
Well, his resume says he attended Howard. Howard’s not really known for their engineering program. We should keep looking.
Boss: I worked with him for 4 years. He’s excellent. He’s an internal candidate, so there is no additional overhead. He’s a perfect fit.
Hiring dude: Yeah, but he’s from Howard. I have reservations about someone from Howard (wink wink)
Boss: I get what you’re saying. Fuck you, I want him and if you don’t authorize it I’ll go over your head and get you fired for discrimination.
Hiring dude: uh, ok then.

20

At work… I’ve never seen any real hostility or bigotry.

Well, not since graduating from college and working in the business world. When I worked various retail or blue-collar jobs in my teens, I heard every racial and sexual slur imaginable from co-workers.