There are some things I don't really talk about much, not because it's insignificant or too painful, but because it hasn't happened all that often; at least not overtly. But when I do think about these things, I just shake my head. I am referring to assumptions made about you by people based on the way you speak, or the name you are given. Please, PLEASE read this blog post by Daisy, if you haven't already. Daisy is a blonde-haired blue-eyed American woman with an African-American name. Some highlights:
And I only got my silly record and book reviews published when I started using a pseudonym. Were they suddenly more readable?Or even better:
When I did customer service, I worked with mostly black women.
And we were supposed to give our names, like good customer service
robots: "Thank you for calling blabbity blabbity, I'm _____, how may I
help you?"
"WHAT did you say your name was?"
Here it comes.
I always repeated it, obediently. And I often heard lots of illuminating stuff after that. A few:
"Are you a n-gger?"
"Are you black? Give me someone white. I want someone who can find their ass with both hands, no offense."
"Oh, God no."
(to someone else in the room) "Oh guess what, guys? I've got ______ on the phone, and she's gonna -solve- our problem!!!!" (room responds with hoots, hollers, boos, laughter, etc.)
"Give
me someone white, and don't argue with me about it, just do it." (On
these calls, I very much enjoyed getting the black supervisor with the
British accent on the line; we both enjoyed putting one over on them.
But I always made sure to tell the supervisor what was up.)
In other cases, I dug my heels in. Fuck you, I thought.
In
short, on the phone, when assumed to be black, I reacted that way. When
asked point-black if I was black, I wouldn't tell. "Why?" I'd ask.
"Because
I need to get someone who KNOWS WHAT THEY ARE DOING," they'd reply,
screaming. They would wait a half-hour for a supervisor they believed
was white, before they'd let me deal with their situation, as I could
have done in 5 minutes or less.
They made all sorts of
assumptions when I wouldn't tell. "Most white people don't want to be
mistaken for black," said one woman authoritatively, "so I think you're
black, but you don't sound like it." Obviously, she thought this was a high compliment.
I can point to a few incidents in my life where similar things have happened.
- When I called the white Quebecois landlady of the crappy apartment in which I live, we spoke about the place for a bit before deciding on a time to meet. When we did meet, the first things she said to me was "I didn't know you were black." I wonder if she would have made the trip from Laval if she knew. She then attempted to reassure me by saying how good she was to black people by virtue of the fact that she rents to them. If I weren't so desperate for a place to live, I'd have told her to go fuck herself.
- This. Not the video, but the first comment by the Zionist.
- When I was selling educational software, courses and computers over the phone many years ago, I would sometimes work the evening shift until 10pm. I would work with a women called Rebecca, who had been there for 2 years. One time a woman that sounded in her 50s calls up, and Rebecca took the call. The woman was having some kind of problem that Rebecca (or anyone else) could resolve. At this point the woman gets very angry and decides that there actually is a solution, but that it could not be solved by a woman, since women can't really solve problems, or some such thing. Instead of telling this woman where to go and likely losing her job, Rebecca informed me of the situation, asked me to pose as a manager and calmly explain that the situation was beyond our control. This woman said more than once how happy she was to speak to a man because she felt as though she were in good hands. What a fucking bitch she was.
- This isn't me, but a former classmate of mine. Her name was Rebecca Nicholson. She was six feet tall, average build, very bisexual and at the time had a funny haircut which I can't quite recall. But the only important thing is that she was a girl. I didn't know this, but apparently the male teaching staff at McGill is incredibly sexist (and Lord knows what else). So much so, that she would avoid seeking any help from them whatsoever, and would never indicate her gender through her name when handing in assignments. She would sign them simply R.K. Nicholson.
- Job applicants with white names needed to send about 10 resumes to get
one callback; those with African-American names needed to send around
15 resumes to get one callback. - The 50 percent gap in callback rates is statistically very significant...It indicates that a white name yields as many more callbacks as an additional eight years of experience. (emphasis mine)
- Whites with higher quality resumes received 30 percent more callbacks
than whites with lower quality resumes. But the positive impact of a
better resume for those with Africa-American names was much smaller. (This reinforces the idea that you have to be twice as good as a black person to get half the rewards.) - Further, discrimination levels are statistically uniform across all the
occupation and industry categories covered in the experiment. Federal
contractors, sometimes regarded as more severely constrained by
affirmative action laws, do not discriminate less. Neither do larger
employers, or employers who explicitly state that they are "Equal
Opportunity Employer" in their ads.
One last note: It's not surprising, but still very interesting to see just how much bigotry comes out when you think that you cannot be identified or really called out on your behaviour. Customer-service reps are typically supposed to "handle" crass, racist, sexist, etc. kind of behaviour because the public knows that they are considered to be king (or queen). Same thing goes with the Internet. I doubt that jackass on YouTube would have the stones to say something so ridiculous to me in person. And gamers? There are people that actually think that we are the most tolerant and inclusive subculture there is. Have you ever actually played online? I have never heard such racist, sexist and heterosexist remarks in my entire life by any other group. Mos Def comes to mind:
And even if they've never said it, lips stay sealedI would like your comments on these experiences as well as how you have witnessed, experienced or even better, participated in this type of discrimination.
They actions reveal how their hearts really feel
Wow! I have lots of stories to tell about this topic but I will only tell a couple of them. My first job as a federal employee was answering the phone as a customer service rep for the feds version of a 401k. One day I had a call where the guy would not accept my answer so he wanted a supervisor. The acting supervisor that day was a black female, she took the call and after resolving the call the caller told her she must be white because she was so smart. She asked him if it would have made a difference if she was black and he told her that it would have because the black person would not have understood what he was talking about. She then proceeded to tell him that she was black as the ace of spades and he was a racist pig.
One summer, in between semesters, I was working in a bookstore and we needed to hire a couple of high school kids for the summer. My manager asked me to go through the stack of applications and pull out the ones I thought were the better candidates. After reading each application I gave her about 20 of them; she proceeded to go through them herself and took out all the ones that had "black" names. When I asked her how do you know they are "black" names she said they all have La or Le or don't make sense and then when I asked her why was she doing that she said "we have our quota of blacks already."
Horrifying, honestly.
Upon learning my name, people often automatically assume I am not from here. "When did you move to Canada?" some would ask, or "It's amazing, you really have no accent at all."
Years ago, I worked at the campus computer store. I was the only female salesperson there. We would serve customers in the store and also often by phone. One day, a woman called who was interested in buying a computer. I answered the phone, and she asked to speak to someone directly in sales. "Yes, that would be me, how can I help you?" She became immediately agitated saying: "No, no, I want to speak to a person who knows computers!!" But I was such a person, I insisted. She grew angry and asked me to pass the phone to a man so that she may be served.
I am sheepish to admit that I passed the phone to Derek, saying, "She wants to talk to a guy." I did not know what else to do, really. Ironic that Derek did not know the answers to her questions but answered them as I provided them to him on a pad of paper.
Fucking twat.
Oh.
DON'T get me started!
I could set your blog aflame with the combustive stupidity I encounter on a daily basis where these topics are concerned.
In fact, here's a fresh 'un:
This weekend someone asked me what the origin of my name is. (A perfectly normal and expected question, considering it is an unusual moniker.) Upon replying to his query, he cheerfully asked if I "like it here" and... if I "plan to stay."
*snarl*
I held my tongue ( hard for me, that, lemme tell ya )but kept it as fuel for my workout later that evening - no joke.
I swear, if only some engineer could find a way to harness (methane-based?) energy from nit-wittery - we'd have a reliable source of energy to take us well into the next millennium.