When I worked in China a colleague told me, in all seriousness, that Chinese children were smarter than any other. I asked why she thought that and she replied that she’d seen it on the telly :smack:
I’ve noticed that. And the women can be worse than the men. Working in restaurants is also the only times I’ve been hit on by gay men. One was my supervisor who had no problem wanting to grope me. These college men would come in, go into the back room, and if he got to rub them a little they got free lunch. I also noticed he gave more french fries and better food to males than females.
I think everyone should have to work in a restaurant where you really learn to have a thick skin.
For my part, I’ve had 2 jobs where they flat out said they wont hire me because I’m a white male.
One teaching recruiter said flat out “if your black in our district, you can write your own ticket”.
I was having lunch with a group of my colleagues, all academics. One of them had just come back from a trip to a third-world country. He said that it was great because all of the social progress of the last sixty years hadn’t happened there.
The colleague he was sitting across from was black.
And gay.
Various people challenged him on his assertion, and he just kept defending it. And this was not the first-- or last-- such statement to come out of his mouth.
I called out a guy who was sorting and tossing resumes into the trash. He didn’t want to consider anyone over “about age 35”. I had to REMIND him, rather forcefully, that he was breaking the law.
Is that illegal for people under the age of 40?
I know it’s wrong, but I can’t stop laughing at this.
About 10 or 15 years ago, I stopped by my dad’s office to meet him for lunch. He told me he wanted to introduce me to his newest salesman, Curt. I followed my dad to Curt’s office where he stopped, made a sweeping Vanna White gesture, and said, “Look, Inter Alia, I finally hired a black guy! First one ever!” I remember hiding my face behind my hands and wishing the ground would open up and swallow me whole.
Curt, bless his heart, just smiled, laughed, and said it was nice to meet me.
Federal law specifies 40, but states may set a lower limit.
I recently spoke to an anti-abortion protestor who told me in all seriousness that “Things were better in the 1950’s when men were running everything.”
Me: You mean white, Christian, straight men.
Him: No, it was just men.
Me: You are expressing a racist belief.
Him: No, I just said “men.”
Me: In the 1950’s, it was white men
He never did get the racist implication of what he said.
How long ago was this?
Back when this book was relatively new, I was in a book club and we read it. One of the other club members, after graduating from high school in the 1950s, got a job as a receptionist in the HR department of a local company. Literally the first thing she was told on her first day of work was, “If a black person comes in to apply for a job, throw the application away as soon as they leave.” :eek: :mad:
eta: Might help if I posted a link.
She was fired for refusing to do that; as one could expect, she was caught when a black person came in for an interview. It was something she had never regretted doing, even though she needed that job to help support her family after her father had died a couple years previously.
I once called a machine shop to check on the status of some parts being fabricated. I referenced a PO number and the head machinist said “hang on, I don’t know PO numbers. I’m not good at the skirt work.” When he got back on the phone, he said he probably shouldn’t have said that. A great non-apology.
I’m a public librarian. I have seen it all.
Actually the worst racism I’ve seen is a particular patron who is an African American woman who’s prone to screaming at the top of her lungs at the white librarians about what evil cracker racists we are. You know, when we call Security because she’s disrupting not just the library but everybody in a six block, because clearly we can’t stand to hear a black woman speak. So that’s always fun. Just because her tone and volume are both incredibly vile and because she does it all the time and nobody ever throws her the fuck out. This isn’t that "black people are racist too!’ bullshit, this is a horrible person who just happens to be black and also a racist.
Close second is the very frequent use of the n-word towards many of our security guards when they do throw some people out.
Tons of microaggressions, mostly towards us female types, of course. Occasionally the guybrarians do get some shit because people assume they’re gay. There’s at least one guy in the Children’s Room; I assume he has seen some shit but I haven’t heard it.
Honestly, as I think about it, the worst stuff I’ve heard is discrimination directed at our homeless people. Some people lean in and conspiratorially ask me if there are a lot of “those people” in here, or ask questions about them like you’d ask a zookeeper doing an informational tour, and more than once I’ve heard “how do you feel safe here with them?” And there are a ton of homeless assholes in here, don’t get me wrong. But some of the things people say makes me utterly sick.
I was raped at work by my boss. Do I win?
I was about to post a joke, but now I hesitate, is this true?
I can think of two people who were physically attacked and one more who was physically threatened, all for being gay, at work whom I know and work with now.
I started working in 1973 and saw a resume wadded up and thrown in the trash because the person was black. And I certainly heard things like, “I dunno, a girl engineer?”
But if I think about the last few years, I haven’t heard anything physical, or verbal and directed at a specific target, or any explicit misbehaviors regarding hiring or advancement or compensation. What I hear these days is usually inappropriate humor about demographic groups when nobody thinks any of the people in that group is present (as if that would make it OK), and also the issue of whether statistics indicate that opportunities work the same way for people in all demographic groups.
Why hasn’t this woman been banned from the library? I patronize a library that is on the edge of a neighborhood that’s inhabited by a lot of people like this (of all races) and they’ve had to do that more than once, and that’s just when I was there. Sadly, most of the people they’ve had to ban have been children.
As for male librarians, male nurses get a lot of (usually) false assumptions made about them WRT their sexuality too. I mean, we have women doctors; what’s wrong with male nurses? Oh, and they’re not male nurses, either; they are NURSES, period. :rolleyes:
Well, I was raped by my boss while doing work, I wasn’t at work - so its true enough. And the funny thing - I later turned him in for sexual harassment. He thought he was entitled to the sexual services of his secretary.
Same here. I think…I think I might be black. I eat a lot of meat.
I’m very sorry to hear this. I’m glad I hesitated before joking.
It was long ago and made me a better person. But really, there is sexism in the workplace. A sense of male entitlement. Its still there, although I suspect that MOST of the men who thought that they were entitled to sleep with their secretaries in some sort of sick MadMenesqe reality have retired.
This asshole, when he needed to replace me, replaced me with a string of cute, young, unqualified to be executive assistants (gee, that describes me at the time too), women he could take advantage of - that didn’t last because they quit quickly for some reason - until he got fired for what he did to me (after two years of investigation and me being told I had asked for it by HR and legal). He wouldn’t even interview the married, well qualified, professional EAs in their 30s and 40s (which is what ended up taking him down, I think - had he straightened up and hired some teenager’s mother perpetually on Weight Watchers, the company wouldn’t have seen him as “liability walking” and he’d have kept his job. But one look at the string of women who went through his office during that two years should have made legal start turning green).
This is something we don’t really get in the U.S. Unlike ZPGZ who has identified as Roma, I’m a little tiny bit integrated Roma, my great grandparents on my paternal grandmother’s side decided to pass 100 years ago when they emigrated to create a better life without the racism of the old country. Most Americans I run into have no idea what Roma means. Even the word “gypsy” has more romantic connotations than thieving ones. I’ve never run into any backlash from Americans if I mention that I’m about 1/4 Roma, most don’t know what it even means.
However, if I talk to someone from Europe and mention it, I get an incredulous “you can’t possibly be” - because apparently I’m clean, well spoken and haven’t robbed them. The whole “only a quarter and integrated” thing seems to explain it to them, but there is a really nasty racism at play there. I don’t mention it - besides, to Europeans, I’m American - its a strange American thing to refer back to what your great great grandparents were to define yourself.