Racism in the Workplace: a Memoir (Part Three)

PART ONE
PART TWO

One day three of us sat down to lunch in the company breakroom. I usually take lunches in my truck to avoid exactly the kind of encounter that was about to happen, but I haven’t had a working motor vehicle in months now, so I was forced to share space with the other guys. A subcontractor invited himself to join us, as they sometimes do—I’ve gotten used to forced familiarity with near-strangers.

Then he decided to tell a joke. It was too off-color to repeat on a family blog, but it was about the shortcomings of the Affordable Care Act. Fine, whatever, I turn selectively deaf whenever my coworkers talk politics. Except rather than dividing the two guys in the joke into the Democrat and the Republican, or the Rich Guy and the Poor Guy, he divided them into the Black Guy and the White Guy. The punch line: Black people are poor, and Obamacare condescends to them.

In Stamped From the Beginning, his history of American race relations Dr. Ibram Kendi writes that racism didn’t justify slavery, slavery justified racism. Economic policies generally come first, and bigoted attitudes follow afterward, a post facto justification. Kendi, a historian, cites generous primary sources to prove this, and I believe him. American history isn’t unequal because we’re inherently racist, we’ve become racist to live with our inequality.

However, the fact that one White worker could tell that joke, and two other White workers could laugh at it, tells me attitudes don’t necessarily follow policy. Once people who consider themselves protected by the economic structure, they won’t relinquish that protection, just because policies shift to ban outright discrimination. My coworkers have internalized racist attitudes that make “Black equals poor” funny, and will resist changing their minds, whatever the cost.

As I wrote this series, the Rayshard Brooks murder grabbed international headlines. My co-worker I wrote about previously, the one who wondered why George Floyd was so famous, also groused aloud about the attention poured on Brooks. Even after acknowledging that police shot Brooks in the back, while he was running away, and that he posed no threat to anybody, this guy still complained: “If people knew the stress police were under every day, they wouldn't complain so much.”

My conscience reverberates whenever anybody says anything like that. I know I should protest, that I should challenge the attitude that any stress ever justifies official violence against nonviolent civilians. But I’ve previously been made to feel unsafe at work, even felt it necessary to rip political stickers off my truck to protect my safety. My coworkers’ attitudes are no longer about justifying official policy. They’ve internalized an attitude of inequality.

It strikes me, however, that society’s nominal protection, accorded to people on the “good” side of social divides—the protection sometimes called “White privilege”—doesn’t often protect these people. Sure, they have the reassurance that they won’t get murdered under color of authority for nonviolent offenses. But most of the men I work with are living paycheck to paycheck, with little expectation of doing better. We’ve become a semi-permanent White underclass.

Worse, that underclass is spreading. My former university colleagues are increasingly disadvantaged by the status quo, their pay scales frozen, their department dominated by adjuncts, and their discipline openly disparaged by STEM advocates in the administration. They, too, respond by buying deeper and deeper into a hierarchy that keeps the department lily-white. Blue-collar or white-collar, workers would rather commit to the lie than face the truth.

Because the truth is, the problem we face isn’t transitory. The entire system favors those who have over those who strive. Blue-collar management positions and skilled tradesman jobs go to those who have expensive academic credentials, not those who work hardest. Scholarly jobs move toward those to whom academia comes easily, which mostly means coming from backgrounds wealthy enough to afford book collections and college prep courses.

Fixing the problem will require dismantling the entire system, possibly by force. And that will hurt everybody in different ways. First, revolution always displaces the poor immediately. Later, though, we’ll have to scrap the entire superstructure, meaning anybody who’s played by the rules and gained any scrap of seniority, will see their accomplishments taken away. To put it another way, the current system is unfair, but fixing it will also inevitably be unfair.

So my coworker, who’s only marginally protected now, would rather defend that protection than risk losing everything to improve everyone’s lot. And somehow, that’s funny.