Dorothy Butler Gilliam: ‘I am not a maid, I am a reporter’ | Hacker News Reader

Dorothy Butler Gilliam: ‘I am not a maid, I am a reporter’

bbc.com

"There were some old style editors who were still at the Post when I was there. One of them said, 'We don't cover black murders because those are cheap deaths,[..]Inside the newsroom some of them would say hello or nod or even speak to me but if they saw me outside the building they would pretend they didn't know me."

I honestly can't even imagine what it's like to live like that. Not just the callousness but also just having to deal with it every single day, and probably the indifference by everyone else. Pushing through that over years and decades is really astonishing, I'd have probably given up anything a week in.

It's sad that we know we would have given up, but for them it's not even an option.

> One of them said, 'We don't cover black murders because those are cheap deaths,'

If anyone ever wondered what attitude triggered the slogan "Black Lives Matter"...

Your comment hides a lot of depth and comes off as a bit flippant to me. BLM was largely triggered by cop-on-black killings. Civilian black-on-black killings (like those referred to in the quote) continue to get fairly little attention, even from the BLM organizations themselves. Indeed, this is a fairly common conservative criticism of BLM - that it's an anti-police movement, not an anti-black murder movement. (This is not to express an opinion on the criticism, merely to state it's existence.)

Can you explain that criticism? Why, to them, is that related?

I've seen it before, and I've seen talk show pundits that they watch say it, but whatever is clicking in their head is not clicking in mine.

I am not exactly understanding the train of thought which is being used to invalidate calls for police accountability. I am not seeing it related at all.

I guess a stretch would be "black lives don't matter to them so why are they trying to convince us", or maybe its not a stretch to the people that would think that, but its also hard for me to relate to because I don't really get the segregation mentality, it seems dated

Holding police accountable for unreasonable killings is not being anti-police.

And if that's all BLM did, far fewer people would have any issue with them. But you're simply ignoring reality if you really think that they limit themselves to unreasonable killings.

Like any and every popular movement, there will people that attach themselves to it to serve their own agenda, sometimes fully self serving, sometimes because they see a platform to advance something they see as extremely important for society, even if many other people disagree on the fundamentals or just the methodology. While missteps of the BLM movement deserve to be called out and criticized, it's also important to remember that great many people are more interested with the original core tenets of the movement and so it's not accurate to paint them all because of the actions of a few.

The same goes for the Democratic and Republican parties. I'm sure everyone here could point to bad actions that people have taken in the name of those groups and/or organizations, but that doesn't mean we should assume those negative instances represent the wishes of all the others in that group, or apply the criticism across the entire group when it doesn't reflect a majority of their views.

And before people come back with their perceptions of how much of a group believes in and supports the actions of some, it's worth considering that opposition groups will always latch onto the problem people and subgroups and play them up as larger than they are, so the media will almost always either misrepresent them as a larger or smaller portion of that group than they actually are.

Yeah like that person who lit a cop car in Seattle on fire! Oh, they were white? And from Texas? And didn't appear to believe that black lives mattered at all? The point I'm trying to get here is that you're arguing with what should be an unimpeachable central thesis "black lives matter". Also, you are kidding yourself. The US is still painfully racist. People were gonna get mad no matter what because it was about black people.

There's nutpicking and then there's having your movement taken over by nuts.

The public face of BLM at its peak, for better or worse, featured a large number of nuts. Like your bro in Seattle there. Or those CHAZ people, also Seattle, who actually killed 3 black guys in as many weeks as part of their black lives matter protest. In the mainstream, anyone who acknowledged black-on-black crime or said that rioting might be a bad PR look was called a fifth column or concern troll.

Mob mentality is a thing, I'm not perfect either but a lot of people got carried away.

The point I was making is that my "bro" wasn't part of BLM, but was merrily lumped in by media services that were actively lying during the protests in Seattle.

And yeah, the people who said that about protesting were concern trolls. There was a lot of police on protestor violence, and there was an honestly alarming amount of lies spread in news during that time. I'm talking about misreporting of events I was present for, or was actively watching live feeds of.

He was at a BLM protest and lit up that cop car. I checked, his quote was "I got carried away".

No comment on CHAZ killing 3 black dudes? Is that a pro or anti 'black lives matter' action?

You can define your personal boundary for who "counts" and not, have it include all the peaceful people and none of the bad/unwise people, and call everyone who disagrees a concern troll.. and hey, you'll be right, according to you.

Nope, no comment because I don't know what you're talking about. I spent some time reflecting on this little interaction and it really reminded me of when it was going on. I got a call from my grandmother to watch out because she had heard about some really ugly things and these Seattle riots, and was I staying safe? And it was bizarre, because the places she was describing were places I had been, and I had zero evidence for anything she described. It was like she was living in a reality where I was under siege while I was going to the protests that she was convinced were violent riots. Because that's how they were being reported.

Which brings me to talking to you. You've got this world view I can't validate but I suspect was informed by broadcasts that at the time I materially disagreed with, due to them being materially incorrect. You're characterizing the activity as a riot and talking about CHAZ like you know what it was like, but you don't. If you did you'd probably mention the fucking stupid garden people put in that immediately stopped being maintained, or the teargas fired at peaceful protesters, or the mayor promising that wouldn't happen anymore and that promise being broken less than twelve hours later, or that a big part of what was going on was that Seattle was trying to remove federal oversight in the form of the consent decree - Seattle has a pretty ugly history with its police, and a consent decree is a no fault agreement to oversight. Oh or the person who tried being a vigilante peace-keeper, how that didn't go over well, and ended in tears and hugs or any of the other bizarre events.

And that person - they weren't involved with BLM, thats the point. They came in from out of state and took advantage of some chaos. They were not ideologically involved. This is not a BLM equivalent of right-wing terror attacks. The rhetoric in the streets was to be on the lookout for agent provocateurs trying to stir this into violence, that anyone being violent or destructive was actively working against any kind of social reform or change.

You could just Google 'chaz shooting'.

It sounds like you see this as a tribal issue. Where it's your tribe vs the other tribe and saying something like "it got out of hand at times" would be conceding ground.

Consider the current moment where critical race theory has now been weaponized back against liberals and used to delegitimize legitimate points and problems we have. Maybe this could have been avoided if the movement had told Robin DiAngelo to shut up and stop giving them ammo. Instead they tried to 'cancel' anyone who saw this coming a year out, like Lee Fang or David Shor.

You happy with the results? Was it worth it? Where are the wins?

“reasonable” and “justified” are arbitrary standards created randomly across every jurisdiction

getting the “perfect case” is not really possible when the “rulings” simply match your pre existing appeal to authority or not

people are therefore pushing as many cases as possible into the national spotlight to make it more obvious that uniform accountability standards republic-wide are necessary. if you feel some other killings need more attention then do that

The two issues (police violence targeting the black community and internal violence in the black community) are closely coupled, though. Broadly speaking, communities that don't have reliable and safe access to state-empowered law enforcement (say, if there's a threat or history of law enforcement applying violence unjustly or indiscriminately or simply an absence of law enforcement) will turn to resolving disputes internally, and that "resolution" tends to be more brutal than what is applied by a modern police force. Historical examples include the US old west, Scottish highlands and many versions of organized crime (notably the Sicilian and NYC mafias and the Central American cartels).

When the news media, being (for better or worse) a driver of public opinion and thus electoral policy especially at the local level, ignores both issues (as they have a long-standing habit of doing) while playing up (or even fabricating) reports of black-on-white violence, it exacerbates both issues as well as strengthening the feedback loop between them by driving support in the broader community for more hard-line policing.

The primary thing that seems to change news media is a change in ownership

Alot of public opinion on things can shift as local news media is bought away from various families

The fact that police often threaten underpolicing of black communities in response to protests goes a long way to explaining why cops killing black people and people who aren’t cops killing black people are related. I wouldn’t say the movement is ignorant of this connection at all, it’s a big part of the argument. To oversimplify, black communities are faced with a Hobson’s choice of violence at the hands of police or violence at the hands of criminals. White communities for the most part can trust that the police will fight crime in their communities without subjecting them to violence in the course of it.

Majority of murders are among people of same race and demographic. People kill those that are nearby and those they know.

So you have white on white killings too, despite that term being literally never used. Majority of murders are male on male killing, males both being same race. Then you have domestic murders and those are also people living close to each other.

Black on black murders don't get little attention. They are the kind of murder mentioned fairly often, most often when someone argue that cop violence is not issue.

This is still the case today, you can tell by which murders get covered in the press.

What I can't imagine is what it was like to be that person. I wasn't alive (much less socially or politically active) in the time period being described. I'm alive now, when we have similar but different attitudes towards racism and sexism. However, people who I know and respect, who taught me the fundamentals of morality as a child, were those same people in the 60s. What goes on inside the head of a person in this kind of environment? Are they oblivious? Do they rationalize it? Are they conflicted or confused but pressured? How is this cultural attitude maintained in adults or taught in childhood?

I'm aware of some similar externally confusing contradictions in my own life - I eat beef and pork at family gatherings, though I believe those animals to be nearly as complex and intelligent as my own beloved dog; my home, vehicles, and lifestyle contribute fewer greenhouse gasses than my neighbors' might but still far more than they must if we're going to reverse climate change; I worry about erosion of privacy and corporate overreach but find the utility of Google's communication and navigation tools and Amazon's low-friction product delivery too compelling to avoid the appalling privacy implications...

Will my children and grandchildren look back in horror at how I used to live? Did my parents and grandparents have the same questions and rationalizations about about their own lives? I've asked a few of them, but never gotten an answer that allows me to intuit their perspective.

Rationalisation mostly. It is fairly easy to rationalize almost anything.

A whole generation of blacks could not get decent jobs for reasons like that. This generation gave birth to a new generation with less opportunities than they could have had because of the opportunities their parents got denied. It takes long time do undo the damage such profound discrimination causes, and it requires the heroic effort of many individuals like this reporter.

>it takes a long time to undo the damage such profound discrimination causes

yes and for many, the damage is irreversible. Denied access to education is also a big factor Blacks face. If you are unable to study and get a good education, you can't work a decent job. It's then harder for you to let your children study to tertiary level as you might need them to step out to work earlier to contribute to the house, and they are then stuck in lower paying jobs. The cycle then continues when they have kids and when their kids have kids and it goes on for many generations.

This is precisely why Education should not be treated as a business. If Education was free for every citizen, it does a lot to bring equality of opportunity (it does not fix all of the damages from discrimination, but aids significantly in recovery). So is healthcare.

Having experienced education and healthcare in USA and Denmark, I cannot believe such extremes exist in the same world. It blows my mind that the wealthiest country on Earth by such a huge margin could not give its citizens unified and free healthcare and free access to Education. Just imagine what would happen to American economy in the long run if people were free to educate themselves(better workforce) and didn't need to go bankrupt because they got an unfortunate health condition?

I am sad that there are no politicians that think about these in long term. Everyone seems to only care about the next election cycle.

The US public school system is "no additional charge" - you have to pay taxes to help fund it regardless of whether you use it, but you do not have to pay anything beyond those taxes for your children to attend.

It may not be much good, but that's a different question.

Many communities in the US actively cripple their public schools via poor funding (and then send their kids to private schools, leaving only the poor behind).

It’s complicated by the fact that if you do give the public schools money, they spend it on $10 million football facilities for 15 year olds, this is what happened in our community.

No idea about the specific situation in the US, but in my experience these kinds of distortions are almost always because said public school can only get the 10M for sports facilities because there is a specific fund for exactly this but not general school funding. The school then applies for it anyway because that means they can divert 100k or some other paltry share of said funds to be used for general school equipment etc.

"Segregation Academies", still highly prevalent across the south.

But most of these schools remain overwhelmingly white institutions, both because of their founding ethos and because tuition fees are a barrier to entry. In communities where many or most white students are sent to these private schools, the percentages of African-American students in tuition-free public schools are correspondingly elevated. For example, in Clarksdale, Mississippi, as of 2010, 92% of the students at Lee Academy were white, while 92% of the students at Clarksdale High School were black.[4] The effects of this de facto racial segregation are compounded by the unequal quality of education produced in communities where whites served by former segregation academies seek to minimize tax levies for public schools.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segregation_academy

The evangelical movement was central to the formation, promotion, and organisation of the segregation academy movement.

https://ir.vanderbilt.edu/handle/1803/10763

We spend more than almost every country. It's not low in poor areas either; for example, Detroit Public Schools has much higher funding than the state average in Michigan.

The problem is not the amount being spent.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/07/us-education...

This is the fantasy of public education. It is the time of year where we experience the reality of public education. Many parents in the U.S. just spent thousands of dollars in "additional charges" to enroll their children in public schools.

This is true for core instruction but not sports and other extracurricular, which are Pay-fors in many parts of the US. Robert Putnam's "Our Kids" (great book!) is eloquent on the costs and consequences.

True, there is a public school system in the US. I missed to recognise it. As you say, whether or not it is sufficient is another debate.

When I wrote my comment, my thoughts were around higher education though - not primary, middle and high schools. The ones like college education and higher education where people pay through the roof and rack up debts that stay with them for decades.

There are state schools, I got my bachelors and masters from university of alabama and funded it by working at a gas station. In state tuition was ~1200/semester back in 2005. I graduated with ~5k student loan that i paid off in 2 yrs post graduation.

FWIW I looked at University of Alabama tuition now and for an academic year was 10k in-state, or 5k/semester assuming 2 semesters a year. (With fees, room, and board, the total comes over 25k/year.)

So you most certainly can't fund your education at the same institution working at a gas station now with only 5k student loans.

> With fees, room, and board, the total comes over 25k/year

We lived off campus 4 ppl in a 2 bed ( ~100/head). My total living expense was ~350/month. My parents had recently immigrated, so i was totally ok with not having a "college experience" or actually knew what exactly it was. I was able to find another job on campus as an attendent at computer lab which game plenty of time to relax and do coursework.

I agree that now it might not be possible. But its doable if you get grants( which most of my classmates did) and are ok slumming it out though college.

The University of Alabama mandates that all incoming freshmen spend at least one year fully on-campus.

there are tons of exceptions to this. In my case I had almost 3 years gap between high-school and freshman year. My roomates were able to easily prove financial hardship that comes with on campus living.

Even if education is free, having time to study is also a luxury we take for granted. Going to university means a few more years of them not being able to work full-time and contribute to the household income. But for sure, if education was free it would improve access to education and restore some balance.

>Going to university means a few more years of them not being able to work full-time and contribute to the household income. But for sure, if education was free it would improve access to education and restore some balance.

In Poland you can attend higher edu institutions on weekends and work meanwhile.

It often costs you like 1.x * minimal wage per semester, thus in total like 17K PLN for bachelor/engineering degree (3.5 years).

I did it, those a few years will be hard for you when it comes to free time, but I think it's decent trade off, especially if your job is already related to what you're studying, so this way you can have both: degree and work experience.

This sounds like a great system and more countries should implement this. In Singapore (where I'm born), there's night classes/part-time degrees for people who need to work. It would be wonderful if more countries recognized the need for flexible studying options like Poland.

US state-run colleges and universities usually offer night classes as well, but they are just as expensive as day classes.

> In Poland you can attend higher edu institutions on weekends and work meanwhile.

> It often costs you like 1.x * minimal wage per semester, thus in total like 17K PLN for bachelor/engineering degree (3.5 years).

It is indeed something, but why poorer people need 2-3x effort to reach the same level of education? Why are many people against things like public income and free public schools which would fix issues like this? Why do we focus on the ones exploiting the system to get "easy money" instead of focusing on people already exploited by the system which would benefit from this?

In some European countries, like Denmark, students get a salary.

Denmark just passed a law that limits the number of non-white people in a neighborhood.

Source?

https://www.dw.com/en/why-denmark-is-clamping-down-on-non-we...

I'd be shocked if it were true. Where did you see such a law?

It sounded rubbish, so I looked it up and it's a thing! :-O

https://www.dw.com/en/why-denmark-is-clamping-down-on-non-we...

I knew the immigration policies in DK were bad. But, not this bad. While I lived there, myself, and my Danish friends were embarrassed by the obviously discriminatory policies targeted at differently looking people. Particularly, the idiotic law about a handshake with he mayor to confirm naturalisation in Denmark. Under the assumption that Islamic women will hesitate to go through it. The rhetoric from the Folkeparty was always a cause of embarrassment in the Danish society. I did not live near the Copenhagen area where I imagine most immigrant neighbourhoods tend to be around. I realise that I may have been living 4 years a bubble and thinking everyone is so nice and liberal, and always care for the greater good.

It saddens me to know about such discrimination in a country that gets so many things right.

It breaks my heart to just read the following quote from the article linked above.

"I talk with children who are living in this area, and they believe they are Danish because they are born Danish, they have Danish passports, they speak Danish, they go to schools here — but people always tell them: 'You're not Danish because you're Muslim.'"

- This is not a hallmark of an open society. All the Danish people I know (in my apparent bubble) don't care about religion. Just let people be who they are, practice whatever religion they want. I wholeheartedly agree with not allowing anybody to impose their religion on others (this applies to the politicians imposing their beliefs on immigrants too).

I sincerely hope that things turn around for the better, and the reasonable voices of the Danish society votes the discriminatory people out.

By any chance are you Shrikant Narasimhan from Chennai, India that went to the jail that was Sairam Engineering College back in 2006? If so, I sat on a few quiz rounds with you and Vinod.....

Indeed I am :) DM/email to talk further?

Would integration into Danish society be worse if immigrant communities formed insular enclaves? I can see a rational reason to encourage cultural intermixing, so that different cultural groups have to be aware of and support each other.

I lived in DK, and as shocking as it sounds, it's true. Just a nitpick: the law is not exactly against "non-white" people, but about "non-Western". African-Americans would count as Western, Russians would not. But in effect, the policy affects mainly Muslims: it was probably designed with that in mind.

Now I'm really curious how many African Americans are emigrating to Denmark.

Perhaps we shouldn't have watered down the k-12 system so that a high school degree meant something.

A whole generation? More like every generation.

>A whole generation of blacks could not get decent jobs for reasons like that. This generation gave birth to a new generation with less opportunities than they could have had because of the opportunities their parents got denied. It takes long time do undo the damage such profound discrimination causes, and it requires the heroic effort of many individuals like this reporter.

Every new group in the US is initially seen as "the other". After some point, however, employers that hire "the other" find that they can pay them less because there is less demand to hire them, and thus benefit financially, they hire more. As other employers follow suit, over time the salaries go up until they match that of other groups.

Their children benefit. The first generation of manual laborers and farmworkers begets the second generation of policemen, nurses, and soldiers begets the third generation of doctors and lawyers and professors.

In the US this has happened to Irish, Italians, Germans, Russians, Jews, Asians, Indians, and Latinos. Why hasn't this happened to blacks (or has happened in substantially less numbers), despite the latter having the benefit of US citizenship and command of the English language from birth?

"Inside the newsroom some of them would say hello or nod or even speak to me but if they saw me outside the building they would pretend they didn't know me".

When you experience this as an immigrant (so the ignoring party knows you have a different nationality) is it generally racism?

- What do you think?

Sounds like fear to me.

Not to excuse racism in any way, shape or form. But I think that fear and racism are quite tightly connected.

The fear that you and your tribe’s quality of life will go down if resources, especially hours of low paid labor, were more equally distributed?

Well it's the very definition of xenophobia, for racist reasons.

I think what you're describing as xenophobia is fear of the other. What I see here is the fear of someone who would actually like to do the right thing, but has fear of what their own kind will do to them.

Of course that's racism, just like what Ms. Gilliam experienced was racism.

I’ve been living in the US for 21 years and whenever I experience this I assume it is racism and/or prejudice. I cannot confront them so I have no way of knowing their exact reasons for doing this. Maybe I’m just socially awkward and I don’t quite know how to play native in this country.

It didn’t bother me much until the last couple of years. I now have a young daughter who’s friends with a lot of the other kids in the neighborhood. I receive the same treatment from some of these other parents outside of the playground or outside of the school line and I can’t help but think they’re going to perpetuate this cycle in the future.

Since it’s generally harder to recognise people of other ethnicities, maybe they either mistakingly think it’s not you (without other context to help them), or think it might be but don’t want to take the risk of offending a stranger.

Even within the same ethnicity, there are myriad reasons why someone might not be confident that they recognize someone else, or that if they do, an unprompted greeting would be welcome.

I have some kind of "face blindness". I have failed to recognize members of my own family who showed up at my house when I wasn't expecting them, and once didn't recognize my girlfriend when she saw me on the street and grabbed my arm. She called my cell phone in tears asking why I had pushed her away.

I always have to greet people with the best halfway "hello again"/"nice to meet you" slurring my words I can and watch carefully to see if they recognize me, then in a panic try to figure out who they are. It is always a terrifying experience, but on many occasions when it has been someone of a different race they've made a comment indicating they assumed it was because of their race.

This assumes a whole lot. How do you know for certain that the person is treating you differently from others because of your background? Depending on the person and the prevailing culture it may be perfectly normal to more or less ignore someone outside the office. If you're constantly on the lookout for some nefarious activity you may start to interpret it where it doesn't actually exist.

I've definitely done the same and have had the same done to me even with people who I am rather friendly with in the office (across all identity characteristics). I'm more introverted than most and generally shy away from a lot of social interactions unless I have to or would obviously come across as impolite. The prevailing culture in my location is to generally leave people alone outside the office as engaging in smalltalk can come across as being annoying when they probably just want to get where they're going, indulge in their phone, or are mentally preoccupied with what they should do for dinner that evening.

> Depending on the person and the prevailing culture it may be perfectly normal to more or less ignore someone outside the office

Precisely this. When about town in public, I ignore everybody except my closest friends or family, or people I have arranged ahead of time to meet up with. For me, this is an application of the Golden Rule. I do not like it when work acquaintances approach me in public and start trying to idly chat me. I don't like it when that's done to me, so I don't do it to others.

Hearing that some people will interpret this as racism or similar is disappointing and disconcerting, but I'm not going to change my behavior. If somebody is making those assumptions, that is disappointing but their assumptions are their responsibility, not mine. And frankly, treating others as I wish to be treated takes precedence over treating others as they wish to be treated.

Doing birthday stories for the rich shows and being told to use the servants entrance seems likely a classist discrimination not a race problem at first glance. Race seems to be the major factor for much of the rest of the article, which I'm not discounting. Whether maid or journalist count as tradespeople or guests is another discussion and the bigger question is why should it matter if the person is a maid or reporter why is it okay to deperson a class of people because of their job?

Back to the discussion of race, how far have we come from the hotel owners denying this black woman access? Airbnb recently has had issues with people attempting to discriminate on race.

Other discussion points aside this reporter got the job done and got the story: "You do what you need to do in order to get the story."

I believe the most important line from the article is here:

"And if you don't have people who see the world through different eyes represented, you just don't have a full picture of what's going on." Often I see only one party line, group think, everyone else is wrong because we are right and facts which don't support the narrative should be downvoted and suppressed attitude which will only create fractured communities and alienated people. To come together we must seek the truth, we must not silence different eyes, but must provide reasonable reproof with documentation to those who spread misinformation.

> Doing birthday stories for the rich shows and being told to use the servants entrance seems likely a classist discrimination not a race problem at first glance.

Here's a thought experiment: imagine the Post sent a white female reporter to cover the same event. Do you suppose the butler would assume this reporter was a maid? It is just a thought experiment. We can't know the outcome. But Ms. Gilliam lumped this in with everything else because she assumed the butler inferred her class and role from her race. She might have been wrong, of course, but her inferences should count for more than ours. She was there. She lived that life in that time. It seems pretty likely that people in that time assumed black women with business at houses of the wealthy were maids and improbable that they assumed women in the kit of a reporter in general were maids.

Things change slowly. This reminded me of a fascinating book I read years ago, Volunteer Slavery, by Jill Nelson, the first black reporter hired for the Post’s new Sunday magazine in the ‘80s. Although the restaurants in the neighborhood may no longer have been segregated, some of the newsroom attitudes hadn’t changed much. The book also happens to be quite funny.

https://amzn.to/2XFSa68

> When Dorothy Butler Gilliam arrived at a wealthy Washington woman's 100th birthday party the doorman told her she couldn't enter via the front door. "The maid's entrance is around the back," he explained.

Just reading it boils my blood.

For the record, this happens to any minority. It boils my blood too when someone says to me at a trade show "I'm looking for the CEO" and I'm standing right there, with my name badge and title of CEO. Or more prevalent: they walk straight up to my (non-technical) sale colleagues who more "look" the part.

I worked part time at a grocery store as a cashier while studying.

Several times people would come up to me while I was out in the shop restocking or similar, and clearly assumed I was the manager or ask if I was.

The only common theme I could figure was that I was the only guy at work at those times. A couple of times it happened when I was together with the actual manager, a woman about my age.

I saw the same thing with the assistant manager, a slightly older guy. If he and the manager were standing together, people would address him first, asking if he was the manager.

Maybe you just don't look like a salesman. Typical CEO look :)

Some examples from the UK:

A few years ago (2016), a black MP (Member of Parliament) entered a members-only lift in the parliament building (House of Commons). Another MP (unamed) in the same lift told her: "This lift really isn't for cleaners." [1]

More recently (September 2020), a black barrister (type of lawyer) was mistaken for a defendant three times in one day. Her experience was widely reported in the press. [2]

These examples received press attention, but there are undoubtedly many examples that are never reported (for people from any ethnic minority). There have been horrible examples of racism against people of South-East Asian origin during the pandemic.

Sometimes, it feels that progress is being made. At other times, it seems much still needs doing.

The problem of discrimation appears to be Europe-wide too. The European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) published a survey in Nov 2018 that examined the experiences of almost 6,000 people of African descent in 12 European countries. Summary of weighted results across all surveyed countries (taken from the report): https://imgur.com/a/gcHR5dk

[1] Black MP Dawn Butler 'mistaken for cleaner' in Westminster: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-35685169

[2] Black barrister mistaken for defendant three times gets apology: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-essex-54281111

There's also this article that was linked to the original.

https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-54623417

> A few years ago (2016), a black MP (Member of Parliament) entered a members-only lift in the parliament building (House of Commons). Another MP (unamed) in the same lift told her: "This lift really isn't for cleaners." [1]

That surely can't have been a mistake, I don't know if the cleaners there are uniformed, but even if not I assume she would've been dressed more like an MP (the MP that she was) than a cleaner, especially a cleaner - as opposed to just non-member aide or whatever - must've been a deliberately racist comment? [*]

(HoC dress code is a lounge suit for male, and unspecified but typically an equivalent appropriate suit/dress for female members. I'd have thought any member, whatever gender/colour/race/etc., that swapped clothes with a cleaner would be kicked out of the chamber before long.)

[*] Assuming it's true - I must admit this sort of unnamed perpetrator, unverifiable story does strike me as a bit suspect. But I think that's fine anyway even if so, the specifics aren't really important, it can be a parable for how she feels generally on other (real) occasions.

> [*] Assuming it's true - I must admit this sort of unnamed perpetrator, unverifiable story does strike me as a bit suspect. But I think that's fine anyway even if so, the specifics aren't really important, it can be a parable for how she feels generally on other (real) occasions.

You're right, I refuse to believe any sitting member of a governing body that [recently put out a report][1] saying Britain is the least racist country in the world could have deliberately tried to make a black MP feel unwelcome

[1]: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-report-of-the...

I'm not quite sure how to take your comment, I think it's meant sarcastically? Note the bit the the asterisk was on was me saying it sounds deliberately racist. And I said assuming it was true and that it doesn't matter if it isn't because it can be how she feels generally or on other occasions.

Maybe I'm getting the wrong end of the stick, but it seems like you're reacting as though I said 'no way, didn't happen, she's a liar, nobody was racist to her, racism doesn't exist'(?) - which is not at all what I said.

I'd venture that in this day and age, the average person has more respect for maids than for reporters. While being a maid may not be a great job, it does actually benefit other people, and folks would miss maids if they all quit tomorrow.

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