When your coworkers are racist

How long does it take you to realize you’re in a room full of racists? For me it takes approximately 2–3 seconds to do a complete room scan and maybe another 3 to process what I just saw. At that point I will have successfully taken the temperature of the room, and discerned which of the occupants are most likely to harbor some form of racial animus. I live and work in a suburb of Kansas City, so this is something I do routinely. I recently realized at my last job, that I had failed to correctly analyze the room for the first time. I had done the initial assessment, and I had processed it on day 1. My bet was 70% of the room had some form of predisposed bias. That was on first glance. That number was confirmed when I witnessed some stray Trump memorabilia on a desk. When you work with people who are between the ages of 35–60, majority white, in a state like Kansas, 70% would be the average in most rooms. Even people who are very nice to your face and who would never believe they have a racist bone in their body, still have more than one racist bone in their body. The people who refer to “the hood” in a derogatory fashion, the people who you here in passing talking about the “black lives matter thugs” are definitely racist. You have to sit in your desk for a little while to fully understand how bad it is. I needed that job to be good so bad that I did not actually allow myself to have that internal discussion. After all all I had to do was work at my desk. You don’t really have to talk to anybody so why would it matter? Well, it kind of does matter because the hair on the back of your neck is standing up for 8 hours a day. Usually, when you start a new job, people introduce themselves to you. They try to get to know you in some fashion. Now I know what you’re saying, that is in no way an indication of racism. On the surface you are correct. But contextually, it’s very easy to read between the lines with experience. Every black person who has started a job at a majority white company, which is 99.9% of companies here, has experienced all of the things I just talked about. That is an additional layer of work that we don’t discuss enough. That is a weight that you have to carry in addition to your working responsibilities. And that is common. So yeah, the civil rights movement will never be over.