Racism at a gaming company

In the context of the preceding few minutes of conversation the author had with this manager, the only way the necklace question can be taken is as a racist comment.

White people might not suffer from racism where you are but thats not to say they never suffer from racism. Racism exists against all races and all over the world. We shouldn't be focusing on the race of the victims or even the perpetrators we should be focusing on stopping it period.

Ridiculous and juvenile corporate culture aside, the irony of the author's narrative is slapping the reader right in the face. Hard. So hard it hurts.

If you are going to take exception to racist, sexist and stereotypical joking - which is most certainly your right in a professional work environment, you may want to re-evaluate your own notions of "the evil white oppressor" and recognize it for the racism that it is.

I wish I could take this tale at face value, but the author is clearly looking for oppression whether it exists or not. I'm not sure at this point one could expect that this telling is even remotely close to accurate.

Don't fault people who have to put up with this shit, day in and day out, for not having limitless reserves of patience. His job isn't Racism Educator, so why should he have to act like it?

I mean, yeah, ideally everyone is infinitely calm and can call these things out in a measured way every time they happen. But you're asking a lot from the victims here in order to spare the feelings of the aggressors. (Perhaps unintentional aggressors, but aggressors just the same.) What you're suggesting isn't easy.

And what's to say that the person he calls out will take it well? Look at what happened at his workplace: they told him that the things he was complaining about were only jokes and that he was too sensitive. Look at what is happening in this thread: people are complaining about his tone, complaining about his word choice, and insinuating that he's making things up. That's not even going into the people who start out ostensibly agreeing before segueing into what sounds like their main point: how racist they think the author was being.

So give the tone argument a rest. It's one of the most reliable distractions that people fall back on to avoid discussing racism, sexism, and all other kinds of oppression, and it's already taken over way too much of this thread.

> "He tells them, directly, in the same manner as if he were talking to a drunken buddy making an ass of himself at a bar, "what you just said was offensive/racist/etc. I'm gonna assume that you didn't realize it, but now you do. Cool?" He told me this has resulted in all of them apologizing with minimal awkwardness afterwards."

Your world of rainbows and unicorns sounds amazing, where all racism comes from under-informed people who can then be rightly fixed by prompt education!

Clearly, oppressively racist institutions where people are powerless to correct the situation don't exist. Where they appear to exist, the victims just didn't assert themselves strongly enough. If they just calmly told their oppressors that they were being racist and offensive, they would stop!

This totally explains away the entirety of slavery and apartheid. I'm just shocked that no one over hundreds of years just nicely stopped someone, explained how what they were doing is wrong, and had them stop!

Seriously though, I'm glad that your experiences have been exclusively in places where people actually respond to criticism and education. And I mean that - facing the sort of horrific, powerless racism that many people do every day is terrible, and no one deserves to experience it from either end of the stick. Your experience is not generalizable to all instances of racism - it's not even generalizable to a minority of it.