Black isn’t always beautiful for many in the workplace…
Several months ago, a reader of my career column on MSNBC.com was upset at my use of the word “black” in a story I wrote. She wondered why I did not use “African American” in the piece instead.
She wrote in an email:
So many times we subconsciously allow our own personal prejudices and feelings to slip through in our daily activities. Was this one of those times or was it just a grammatical error? I’d like to know.
I explained to her that Associated Press style calls for us to use “black”, but I also felt compelled to speak a little bit to her comments about “our own personal predudices.”
So, in an email back to her I wrote:
I’d like to think I am not prejudice but I’m old enough to know we all have our silent prejudices.
One of my favorite passages on discrimination is by Sartre, the French philosopher — “…There are people who are attracted to the durability of stone. They want to be massive and impenetrable, they do not want to change: where would change lead them? This is an original fear of oneself and a fear of truth. And what frightens them is not the content of truth which they do not even suspect, but the very form of the true–that thing of indefinite approximation. It is as if their very existence were perpetually in suspension. They want to exist all at once and right away. They do not want acquired opinions, they want them innate; since they are afraid of reasoning, they want to adopt a mode of life in which . . . one never seeks but that which one has already found, in which one never becomes other than what one already was.”
Knowing this, if we can come to terms with our fear of the unknown and still treat people with the utmost respect then we’ve truly helped the world in our own small way.
Unfortunately, the world has a long way to go.
I was shocked when I read recent statistics from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that found racial harassment complaints in the workplace are higher than than they’ve ever been — at least in EEOC recorded history. I address the issue in my column today.
It seems mind boggling, especially given what’s happening in the political arena. It makes you wonder about our nation’s silent prejudices as a black man makes historic inroads to the presidency.
January 18th, 2008 at 4:53 am
When Martin Luther King was asasinated, I was all of 7. My Father was a police officer and my hero as well. We were brought up in small borough just outside of Pittsburgh. The news was of course shocking and my mother was very upset because trouble was anticipated. My father was told to report when he was off duty for a 24 hour watch. My mother was more upset, and more worried. As news unfolded, and the telephone calls came amongst what you could call the nieghborhood watch, rumors flew around. Mom would not let us go out and play, she said she heard there was gangs beating up on people. This scared and shocked us. Mom was very upset when the national news reported rioting in California and Illinois. Local news reported a grocery store in Pittsburgh’s Hill district was burning out of control. This was before cell phones and the internet. Our police scanner was on, however almost every transmission was ’scrambled’ as they did at the time. Mom was almost in a panic not hearing anything about what was going on. Her nieghbor friends, knowing Dad was a cop and on duty called several times to see if she had heard anyhting. My brother and I played with our match box cars. My two sisters, alittle older than us, were basically locked in their rooms doing whatever teenage girls at the time did. Dad called right after the six ‘o clock news. I heard Mom, in a very loud response say..’how can you defend yourself with no bullets?’…We were frightened somehow by that. The news revealed nothing. We heard alot of scrambled activity on that scanner come night fall. Mom said she will not allow us to go to school the next day. In my mind, I felt odd about that. Normally that statement would be right up there with Christmas morning, however this circumstance was odd in that you wanted normalcy. We heard Dad pull into the driveway about midnight. We broke alot of rules and my brother and two sisters all came downstairs to see DAd. Dad had what was the white helmet with a glass visor on the kitchen table. It had been split on the on side. Dad had dried blood on his sideburns and a bandage around his head. He said simply he cannot be a policeman anymore because he is now prejudice. He never uttered another word about prejudice. He never said anything bad about any ethnic group except maybe Slovaks, which I am part Slovak, He even praised the great Willie Stargell many times. The only violence in Pittsbugh occurred at Mon View Hieghts, about a mile from our house. Dad told me years later, their police chief decided no officer can have a loaded gun. No matter what no groups of three people or more are permitted entrance within the perimeter of the housing complex unless they are residents and have ID, Turns out, almost incredibly, a truck with five white man drove up to the police cars located outside the complex to assist the officers. They were told to go home and belligerently decided no way, they were concerned about damage to their properties. The police chief ordered their arrest and they decided to fight them. A local pastor, a black man well known in the community pulled into the lot and one of the white men began hitting his car with a baseball bat. Out of nowhere, several black men from the housing complex came over to the lot and began to fight back the white men and the police. Approximately 25 men were arrested and ten men including my father along with three other policemen had to have medical treatment. He said he was prejudice that night, but not against blacks because the white men started all this. He said at the time he did not trust anybody anymore. School was cancelled the next day, I think it was a Friday. When school resumed, thankfully we picked up where we left off. We had a class room chat that to this day still is imbedded in my brain. The chat was about our parents. We had maybe thirty ‘boomers’ in our class, at least 10 were black kids I would be in school with yhrough high school. One black kid said his mother was scared. She would not let him or his brotheres out because she heard there were people driving around and beating people up. In my mind I thought what a coincidence.