#116 “You can either make a stand and have your career limited or accept racism should be the norm and move on.”
“I worked at MSFT for a few years and had a new manager who immediately set about to revisit every decision I had made before he joined the team. Over time I would find nothing I said ever made sense unless I had someone else who was not black say it. Over time, I would see months wasted by renegotiating agreements (I initially made) with other teams to proceed on a product launch. One day this person proceeded to introduce me as the team's token hire, and things went downhill from there. What is interesting is what happened next.
As the emotional toll started to build up, the company pushed me to take a vacation from my bank or continue to report to him while they ‘investigated.’ Once they resolved the investigation and found there was a fault on his part, they proposed this excellent solution.
He would no longer be my manager, but I would have the pleasure of coming to work to see him in the same hallway daily.
During my therapy sessions and the time I spent trying to recover from this, I realized that racism in the workplace could be extremely detrimental. It took me a year to find my way to trust my judgment and skills, and I grew to be unsure about my reactions around Caucasians.
When this happened, I pursued the path to make a statement because I felt double victimized by the company. I complained to the EEOC and engaged an attorney. At the end of it, I got tormented by the racist manager. Then, HR tried to lay punitive measures on me by forcing me to take a vacation and then continue to work close to this person. Finally, I got placed on the do not rehire list because I felt it was essential to get treated as a human being on the job.
Unless you have faced this, you don't realize how demoralizing racism in the workplace can be for those who experience it. Finally, taking a stand comes with punitive damages. You can either make a stand and have your career limited or accept racism should be the norm and move on.
There is so much wrong with the way this ENTIRE process works.”
