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owlectomyObligatory Amptoons link
I only read customerssuck every couple of months, so I'm going to guess that it was a coincidence that a couple of the recent entries boiled down to "... And he/she implied (or said outright) that I was being racist by enforcing store policy!" Which prompted me to think about the times I've dealt with that, as a librarian. Especially when it comes to #4 on the Amptoons list - "Let occasional unfair accusations roll off your back." Key word here, occasional. You still have to consider it seriously and without defensiveness, and let enough time go by to reconsider whether you acted the way you'd have wanted to act.
Scenario: I'm working alone on a Saturday when an elderly African-American woman comes in furious that I sent a letter to her house informing her of a fine for a magazine that she returned. I've only been working there for a couple months, I'm really unsure of whether I'll get in trouble for clearing fines, and my composure is pretty much shot in any case, so after I check the magazine rack for the magazine in question, I ask her to come back when my supervisor is there. And she implies that I'm racist.
At that point in time, I was the only white employee at the library, and some days the only white person who came inside the building. Raleigh is not a very integrated place even today.
I felt pretty hurt, which is understandable, I think. But as I was driving home I realized something: when she was my age, the libraries in Raleigh were segregated. For a black person in the 1950s, it would be perfectly sensible to ascribe bad customer service to racism. Now, that has some awkward assumptions - I think it assumes that racism used to be a problem but it isn't any more, which obviously is not true - but if nothing else it began to shift me away from the perspective that this was about my own feelings. And it was important for me to realize that I was part of an institution that had been racist in the past, and was still somewhat racist when I was working in the itty bitty understaffed underfunded library that just happened coincidentally to be in the black part of town.
And I've learned a lot of things since then to keep that in perspective.
1 - Specific instances of racism can be less visible than bias in general. Let's say you have 1000 coins, and you know that some of them are fair, and some of them may be weighted one way or the other. Let's say you flip each of the coins 5 times, and in total you get 3500 heads, 1500 tails. That is pretty strong evidence that the coins as a group are weighted to heads, but you don't have enough evidence to say which coins are weighted to heads. (Not even if it comes up heads 5 times in a row - a fair coin has about a 1/32 chance of doing that, so you could expect about 31 fair coins out of 1000 to come up heads five times in a row.)
This is a terrible analogy because it divides people arbitrarily into racist people and not-racist people, when that's way too simplistic to apply to the real world. But the point is: when you can see bias in the aggregate, you don't always know whether the bad customer-service experience, or the job you didn't get, is because of race or because of some other factor. So you might misidentify a particular instance, but the alternative is to never call anyone out if you can't be 100% sure, and I don't think that's fair.
2 - On blogs, I've often heard men say, "Catcalling can't really happen that much, can it? Surely I would hear about it more!" - overlooking the fact that catcalling involves the guy who's doing it and the women he's catcalling, so men who aren't responsible usually aren't involved in the conversation. Similarly, it really is not surprising that white people will be aware of less racism than people of color (especially if they grew up in very segregated neighborhoods.) Which leads to thinking, as I did, that racism used to be a problem but not so much now.
3 - If I am accused of racism, my feelings get hurt. If I am a victim of racism, then maybe I don't get the job that I'm otherwise perfectly qualified for, maybe I don't get the mortgage in the neighborhood I wanted to live in, maybe I get arrested when I wasn't doing anything wrong. I am not going to underestimate the impact of hurt feelings, 'cause goodness knows I'm enough of a delicate little flower myself, but in terms of the big picture there are more important things.
Since then I've gotten much better at dealing with people. My social skills were pretty much at zero to start out with, so it wasn't exactly fair to expect people to telepathically intuit that I was quiet and surly to everyone no matter what their race...
I only read customerssuck every couple of months, so I'm going to guess that it was a coincidence that a couple of the recent entries boiled down to "... And he/she implied (or said outright) that I was being racist by enforcing store policy!" Which prompted me to think about the times I've dealt with that, as a librarian. Especially when it comes to #4 on the Amptoons list - "Let occasional unfair accusations roll off your back." Key word here, occasional. You still have to consider it seriously and without defensiveness, and let enough time go by to reconsider whether you acted the way you'd have wanted to act.
Scenario: I'm working alone on a Saturday when an elderly African-American woman comes in furious that I sent a letter to her house informing her of a fine for a magazine that she returned. I've only been working there for a couple months, I'm really unsure of whether I'll get in trouble for clearing fines, and my composure is pretty much shot in any case, so after I check the magazine rack for the magazine in question, I ask her to come back when my supervisor is there. And she implies that I'm racist.
At that point in time, I was the only white employee at the library, and some days the only white person who came inside the building. Raleigh is not a very integrated place even today.
I felt pretty hurt, which is understandable, I think. But as I was driving home I realized something: when she was my age, the libraries in Raleigh were segregated. For a black person in the 1950s, it would be perfectly sensible to ascribe bad customer service to racism. Now, that has some awkward assumptions - I think it assumes that racism used to be a problem but it isn't any more, which obviously is not true - but if nothing else it began to shift me away from the perspective that this was about my own feelings. And it was important for me to realize that I was part of an institution that had been racist in the past, and was still somewhat racist when I was working in the itty bitty understaffed underfunded library that just happened coincidentally to be in the black part of town.
And I've learned a lot of things since then to keep that in perspective.
1 - Specific instances of racism can be less visible than bias in general. Let's say you have 1000 coins, and you know that some of them are fair, and some of them may be weighted one way or the other. Let's say you flip each of the coins 5 times, and in total you get 3500 heads, 1500 tails. That is pretty strong evidence that the coins as a group are weighted to heads, but you don't have enough evidence to say which coins are weighted to heads. (Not even if it comes up heads 5 times in a row - a fair coin has about a 1/32 chance of doing that, so you could expect about 31 fair coins out of 1000 to come up heads five times in a row.)
This is a terrible analogy because it divides people arbitrarily into racist people and not-racist people, when that's way too simplistic to apply to the real world. But the point is: when you can see bias in the aggregate, you don't always know whether the bad customer-service experience, or the job you didn't get, is because of race or because of some other factor. So you might misidentify a particular instance, but the alternative is to never call anyone out if you can't be 100% sure, and I don't think that's fair.
2 - On blogs, I've often heard men say, "Catcalling can't really happen that much, can it? Surely I would hear about it more!" - overlooking the fact that catcalling involves the guy who's doing it and the women he's catcalling, so men who aren't responsible usually aren't involved in the conversation. Similarly, it really is not surprising that white people will be aware of less racism than people of color (especially if they grew up in very segregated neighborhoods.) Which leads to thinking, as I did, that racism used to be a problem but not so much now.
3 - If I am accused of racism, my feelings get hurt. If I am a victim of racism, then maybe I don't get the job that I'm otherwise perfectly qualified for, maybe I don't get the mortgage in the neighborhood I wanted to live in, maybe I get arrested when I wasn't doing anything wrong. I am not going to underestimate the impact of hurt feelings, 'cause goodness knows I'm enough of a delicate little flower myself, but in terms of the big picture there are more important things.
Since then I've gotten much better at dealing with people. My social skills were pretty much at zero to start out with, so it wasn't exactly fair to expect people to telepathically intuit that I was quiet and surly to everyone no matter what their race...
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(no subject)
12/8/08 03:07 (UTC)(Also, randomly I was looking for that Amptoons link this morning, & I couldn't quite remember the title of the post right & had no recollection of what blog it was on--so thanks again!)
(no subject)
12/8/08 04:27 (UTC)