I am not a terrorist | Hacker News Reader

I am not a terrorist

narrative.ly

55 pointsDSK00725 comments

I recently started working the USA as an Iranian born Canadian. My co-workers are openly racist, and my immediate supervisor refers to me as "Car-bomb". He does this in company meetings in front of senior management, and they laugh at his jokes. This never ends, and he has called my family (including my deceased father, who obtained a PhD in engineering from a top Canadian university) a "terror cell". I could go on, but if I do I worry that I may tender my resignation by the end of this post.

Suffice to say, the USA is a very diverse country, both with upstanding citizens who defend their freedom and are beacons of rationality, and people like my supervisor. who are weak, pathetic low-lives who have been spoon fed propaganda via their televisions for their entire lives, learning to fear all that is different from them and thus supporting oppressive government regimes.

To all those who swallow the "american dream" BS hook line and sinker: you have been warned. The grass is not always greener on the other side.

I will be returning to Canada as soon as I possibly can. For reference, I work at a large multinational engineering company as a professional engineer with many years of work experience.

If you're comfortable, can you please email me at michael@fernstrategy.com? Thanks.

Does he realize you don't feel comfortable with those jokes? That sort of over-the-top overtly racist comment is hard for me to imagine being said genuinely, but my friends and I will make similarly appalling jokes directed at each other, where the humor derives directly from the absurdity and wrongness.

Racism towards arabic, persian and 'middle eastern' people certainly exists in America and is a serious problem, I don't in any way doubt you have experienced discrimination. But calling a coworker "Car-bomb" as a nickname is so egregious that I just can't imagine it being said with malice, it seems like a "look how politically incorrect I can be" joke among friends. I don't know, I could be wrong, maybe my experiences and the people I've met aren't representative of other parts of the country.

... friends aren't co-workers. You choose your friends. You friends don't control your paycheck, nor can they fire you. It is a different dynamic, and for this to happen in a manager / direct report situation is insane.

It is so insane that combined with the anon throwaway, I really wish there was some sort of verification.

> But calling a coworker "Car-bomb" as a nickname is so egregious that I just can't imagine it being said with malice,

Calling a black coworker "nig-nog" as a nickname would be so egregious that I just couldn't imagine it being said with malice.

I'd still be appalled if I ever heard it being said.

Don't these people saying these things realise that they're leaving themselves wide open to legal liability?

Why is this post being flagged?

This is a site for technical news, not sociopolitical commentary.

The "best" stories page includes content about Gitmo, the Boston bombings, sleeping patterns, economics, India elitism, investment banks, etc.

Yes and that is a reason why I enjoy reading the site less now than I used to. I come here for technical news, not endless stories about politics, political commentary and complaints about US foreign policy. I can get that elsewhere.

Yeah, because if there's one thing you need, it's another fucking Redis article.

I am glad that I got a chance to connect even in a minor way with someone I view as a fellow traveller. If it means I "enjoy" HN a little less, so be it!

This is not a cartoon for your enjoyment, it is part of real life. You can go back to grubbing for money any time you like.

According to the HN submission guidelines, this is a site for "[a]nything that good hackers would find interesting".

Upvoting for introducing the platform where this story is written and not the story itself (I didn't read and I don't come here to read non-technical stuff). Seems like narrative.ly is competimg with Medium?

Narrative.ly is not like Medium, and it has been around longer.

Narrative.ly is an online magazine. Every day, one story is published, of someone's experience living in New York.

It started out as a Kickstarter campaign: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/narratively/narratively

Narrative.ly is actually using Marquee as its frontend - http://marquee.by. Great product with excellent customer service. I highly recommend it. The editing isn't quite as nice as Medium's at the moment, but the posts look nicer, particularly with photos, IMO.

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