A Black man has filed an employment discrimination lawsuit against a hotel in Detroit, Michigan, alleging the hotel only offered him a job interview after he changed the name on his resume, according to a copy of the lawsuit obtained by CNN.
Dwight Jackson filed the lawsuit against the Shinola Hotel on July 3, alleging he was denied a job when he applied as “Dwight Jackson,” but later offered an interview when he changed his name to “John Jebrowski.”
The lawsuit alleges Jackson was denied a job in “violation of Michigan Elliott Larsen Civil Rights Act.”
I’ve witnessed this first hand from the hiring side for an IT position. I was going through resumes with my boss and he straight up said, “I don’t want any hispanics, I want a white guy.” while tossing anything with a hispanic name to the side without even looking beyond that. This was in Orlando in an area with a large hispanic population. The kicker is that my boss was actually hispanic himself!
In the UK we call that racist taxi driver syndrome. A lot of immigrants come to the UK and because it’s a good money earner, or at least because they think it’s a good money earner, they tend to buy a taxi.
Anyway you get in and suddenly they start telling you about all their world views, usually it’s along the lines have there been too many immigrants. Even though they are an immigrant themselves.
Very much a case of shutting the door behind themselves.
Haha so true. I remember some my friend’s family going on about how we should all vote leave because of all the immigrants.
Mate, you were born in Napoli. You’re as Italian as spaghetti. I’m not that kind of British person and, as far as I’m concerned, you’re more than welcome here but you’re the “immigrant” you hate so much. Not only that, your that being that person while banging on about how bad immigration is to a group of very obviously white native British people. It was just the most bizarre thing ever.
He still has an accent.
I genuinely wanted to be like “but we like you.” I don’t think that would have gone down very well though.
I’ve spent too much of my life not speaking up at all. Then, I finally achieved speaking up by summoning anger and fear to motivate me. But my presentation is harsh and unfriendly.
My challenge now is to learn to disagree, when it needs to be done, but in a friendly and respectful way.
Maybe you should have, I’m almost certain somebody did it later in another conversation. Better from a friend and so on.
I’m Chinese and I am also extremely weary of hiring someone from China. Pretty scared of CCP spies TBH.
This is actually really fascinating to me, the idea that citizenship/nationality is a bigger factor in how you feel and that race isn’t a key factor. It tells me maybe society (globally, generally) is getting less plainly racist, but anxieties around nationality (and what that could indicate about individual attitudes and intentions) is obviously rising and taking its place, so racism ends up being obliquely adjacent to the more direct fear of the state. In other words, general society is making progress with being comfortable with people of different races, whereas country of origin becoming more worrying and slowing down progress.
What a strange disconnect there. We don’t fear individuals, we fear what they represent.
(I ate a gummy an hour ago tho sooooo I feel like I’m just stating the obvious so … Maybe?)
wtf? society is still obviously racist. you must not be black.
Exactly, that’s why I qualified that statement with the terms “generally” across the globe and also distinguished being plainly racist (which I view as hate because of race itself, stereotypes at individual level) from racism that seems to primarily precipitate from fears of or for the state (hate because of the larger stereotyped idealogies or propaganda of that person’s race, whether or not an individual espouses them).
I am not Black, this is true. I primarily worked my hypothesis out from a purportedly Chinese person saying they wouldn’t trust the hiring of people from China. Now, their comment does seem to have a racist component. I don’t know to what levels internalized racism is related to geopolitical fears, but if we consider that this Chinese person is likely not racist to themselves, e.g. hating their individual attributes, we can assume that they are not wary of the Chinese person for being Chinese. Their mistrust in the state makes them so wary they can’t even be supportive of hiring people from China, in what I assume is the US. It seems like racism is only secondary to the primary fear of the state (or some geopolitical facet), the racism coming from a position of self-preservation rather than overt hate of the race.
Fear is going to be the death of us.
Also, I am high and pretty sure I just took the scenic route in describing xenophobia. Shit tits.
it sounds like you heard one specific situation and are conflating that with a general trend
And it sounds like you are still overlooking all of the qualifiers and nuance in my nonscholarly, inebriated statements. In neither post did I assert “society is not racist.”
you said you thought society was becoming less racist
I think it’s not that.
Just when you are a member of a minority, communicating to others of the same minority feels weird.
Along patriotic lines - either you are a bit less real than them, or they than you, first.
Second, more importantly, among certain minorities some people trust “their own” more for business, employment, anything, and thus there are scams based purely on that.
Third, with people of a bit different background you are more eager to give some benefit or doubt or something when they show their personal downsides, with people of “your” group those downsides are much more infuriating and there’s a fallacy of presuming you understand them better.
There absolutely are. The ownership of the company I work for is of a particular nationality, and every single time we have been given counterfeit bills as payment it has been from another member of said nationality, which the owner thinks is one of his “buddies.”
Every time.
And it’s usually those same guys trying to rip us off in other ways, too. I keep telling him that these motherfuckers are trying to take him for a ride about 75% of the time and it’s plainly visible from an outside perspective, but he won’t hear it. They’re his countrymen. (No, I won’t say which nationality.)
You won’t, but being Armenian (EDIT: by heritage, but not so much by immersion, so especially prone to meeting such attempts), I’d guess they are either Armenian or Georgian or maybe Jewish.
Okay, but this is a fundamentally different reason that isn’t born out of general racism or xenophobia.
It’s maybe not ideal, but I don’t consider this to be a morally reprehensible attitude.
“From China” and “Chinese(-American)” aren’t the same thing
I wasn’t expecting that. I would understand that there a slight positive involontary bias towards candidates with a familiar-sounding name, but such shameless behavior is astonishing
That’s not that surprising, if their Hispanic boss was from Cuba, they’re probably a conservative and consuming a lot of right wing propaganda. I know a conservative Puerto Rican who’s afraid of the ms13 gang. He lives in rural NJ.
I know a few Hispanics who really don’t like being Hispanic. Like refuse to talk in Spanish but when abuela calls he will.
If you are hiring in IT and skip everyone without a white-sounding name, you are definitely going to have a much smaller hiring pool.
Are Latinos over represented in your company with respect to the population? That would be a defensible position for your boss on this. I mean if you had 85% Latinos that could be taken as evidence of some sort of ethnic bias in favor of Latinos.
Not legitimately, in my opinion. A candidate should never be hired or rejected to meet certain quotas.
Did you report your boss …
Naa it was a small business and he owned it.
I mean to the labor board, or wherever … there is a poster at every workplace that has the info about who to call when this happens.
Oh shit…