I’m a high school teacher in a large, diverse school district and with a very strong union that was formed in large part as a reaction to this kind of crap (albeit 25 years before I started working there). At work, the school district employees are models of behavior in this regard (although a few post some really weird stuff on Facebook).
Students are better than you’d expect given that they’re teenagers. For example, they recently elected an Iraqi-American homecoming queen, and it very quickly became socially unacceptable to give openly homosexual students a hard time about it.
The parents, though…wow, a few of them are really off the charts.
At a crappy cashier job an older woman (in her 50s. Not that that’s old, but everyone was under 50 and 90% under 40 so it’s a relative thing) applied and my disgusting pig of a boss threw her application out and said “Too ugly to work here.”
All the cashiers he hired were girls. Teens, skinny, and blonde.
I did call corporate on him several times. I can’t remember if he got fired or transferred or quit, but I outlasted him.
There was the officer who flat-out stated that whites make the best medics because blacks are too dumb and asians aren’t strong enough.
There was the very senior NCO who, in a suicide awareness briefing, referred to talking about your feelings as “all that gay shit” and referred to his surprise that a PTSD support group was not “a bunch of fags”.
“I don’t have anything against females but having you here is pretty much the regiment saying they’re giving up on us,” said the NCO of the infantry squadron I and three other female soldiers had just been assigned to.
There was the NCO who blatantly groped me, and it was just his word against mine, so nothing ever came of it.
Stretching the boundaries of ‘work’, but when I was going through the enlistment process a recruiter was warning me about how car dealers try to take advantage of new soldiers, and it was really just a matter of “jewing them down.” When I mentioned to his superior that that wasn’t entirely appropriate I was assured he didn’t mean it, and he didn’t even know I was Jewish so it was okay.
There was the NCO who, prior to doing sit-ups in PT, assured me that he had cut the lining out of his shorts and wasn’t wearing underwear so I and the other females “could get a nice view”. (He shortly thereafter was moved to supervisory position at a training base).
There was the soon-to-be NCO who once informed me that enough rough sex with the right man would, apparently, fuck the queerness right out of me, and his wife did not need to know about anything. He got a verbal scolding, and then promoted to sergeant.
Maybe not under, but over, YES, of course. I was about 45 at the time, and rather pissed at this guy. EDIT: This was an office accounting job, not a McDonalds. The guy had a thing against “old people”.
I really have to disagree strongly on this premise. The reason you don’t experience any anti-Roma prejudice, aside from the fact that you’re talking about 1/4 through you grandparents, is that you identify with the more common North American culture and practices. Openly living Roma who live according to our ethnic and religious traditions (the two are basically the same thing) face quite a lot of prejudice.
I did my post-doc in a lab run by a guy whose sexism was real subtle. He had female grad students and technicians (and of course, a female post-doc). But his lab had a majority male staff. He would sometimes say things that would make you go WTF, but only after you had a chance to think about it.
One day one of the female technicans came into the lab and sat down with a heavy sigh. She’d just had a long conversation with the boss, informing him of her intent to go to grad school and study seagrass ecology in another PI’s lab.
Instead of supporting her, our boss tried to convince her she was only interested in seagrasses because she just wanted to be with her boyfriend (who was student in that other lab). This girl was sharp as a whip and very self-confident, so he couldn’t have been any more wrong or insulting. There’s no way he would have told his male employees anything like this.
This is a story that happened to my father.
He’s a light-skinned black man. If you’re not looking at him real closely, he can pass as white. I’m guessing this was especially true when he was a young guy, just starting off in his teaching career. One day, he was sitting in the teacher’s lounge with the other teachers. The teachers were kvetching about “Afro American” and all the other PC terms for black people at that time (the mid 70s).
My father asked what term they preferred to use.
The vice-principal then says: “Oh, we just call them niggers!” Everyone (but my father) laughed. None of them knew they had one of “them” sitting in their breakroom.
I’ve heard coworkers say bigoted things in private conversation. One woman I know is uber-conservative religious, and has told me that the “Gaystapo” are taking over America, and that she does not believe that women should be in a position of authority over men. However I have seen her interact with gay customers and our female boss, and she is absolutely polite and professional, with no hint of her own personal beliefs poking through, as far as I can tell. So I don’t know if that counts.
Personally, I used to work in an office that was always majority Jewish; at one point I was the only non-Jewish person working there. I would often hear the senior leadership invoke the phrase “Is this good for this Jews?” in conversation while doing business transactions. Sometimes the boss and VP would talk about me in my earshot using Yiddish words they knew I didn’t understand.
I don’t think there was any malice in any of this - they liked me and I did well enough while I was there - but it did make me feel uncomfortable and “out of the loop” sometimes, like when you read about the lone woman in an office who’s not there to pal around in the golf course locker room with the good ol’ boys in the firm.
This was back in the early 70s, when women wore mini-skirts. I was working for a real scumbag. He hired a prostitute as a receptionist, ordered her to wear a mini-skirt with no underwear, and sat her down on a chair with a transparent seat. Then he put a mirrored-surface under her chair. She actually went along with it. She was, incidentally, a lousy receptionist.
I don’t recall seeing any examples of racism/sexism/homophobia/etc. in all my years at work.
However, a coworker of mine once told me that he had worked at a southern office of our company before transferring northeast, and they once rejected a black job applicant because the senior company person involved said “I’m not going to hire a nigger”. (The irony was that this black guy was a very capable fellow, and went to work for a local competitor and beat the pants off the company that refused to hire him in competitive situations over the next few years.)
I believe in certain Jewish circles “is this good for the Jews?” has evolved into a sort-of catchall phrase meaning “is this a good idea overall including all ramifications?” and doesn’t really mean anything about Jews.
Weirdly, I can’t remember a single instance of obvious bigotry in my job. There was a redneck years ago who fired a shotgun at my car while I was delivering a pizza to the house next door, but I can’t ascribe that to racism necessarily.
But hardly anyone in North America has even heard of Roma. I mean, other than someone’s Hungarian grandmother complaining about gypsies or other such nonsense you’d be hard pressed to find a person who recognized the term. You have to be able to identify people before you can discriminate against them.
I’m not sure the “of course” is appropriate. The ADEA has various exceptions including no application to employers with less than 20 employees.
I have traveled throughout the United States I have always encountered plenty of people who knew what “Gypsies” where though they were sometimes surprised to learn that Roma was the preferred term. We’re not unicorns by any means. Also it’s not necessary to be able to identify (correctly) a people before they can discriminate against them. Merely being slightly different is enough. All that’s really necessary is some quantifier in the mind of the discriminating party.
Very true. As a black person with a somewhat ambiguous racial appearance, I’m aware that I might not only face anti-black prejudice, but also anti-Hispanic, anti-some-kinda-Ayrab, anti-biracial, and anti-foreigner discrimination. When I lived in South Florida, which of course is predominately Cuban American, I was always concerned that people would mistake me for a Central American or Mexican. Not because I have anything against these groups, but because many Cuban Americans do and I didn’t want to be treated accordingly.
People often rely on props to peg someone racially. A pale-skinned, blonde-haired woman can look like a WASP when she’s dressed like a Ambercromie and Fitch model. But change her clothing, jewelry, and her hairstyle, and suddenly she could be “some-kinda-Hispanic”. Or Roma. Race is weird like that.
Yes, but ZPG is referring to specifically anti-Roma prejudice. If she was just saying that she gets crap because she’s kind of brown, I wouldn’t find that hard to believe at all.