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Just another day at the office…
I recently shared a brief snippet about the “townhall” discussion about racism and BLM. In truth, it was more a like a struggle session. As I mentioned, all opinions were welcome as long as they were the correct opinions. I don’t need the hassle of HR harassing me about missing the “discussion” so I logged onto the zoom meeting (thankfully, it was all remote), shifted to a different browser window, lowered the volume, and proceeded to do actual work. At several points during the hour-long conversation, curiosity got the best of me and I listened in (a decision I now greatly regret). Here are a few of the highlights (again, remember this a sampling of snippets from when I was actually listening):
“Slavery is alive and well in America today – it has just changed forms. Now it’s the pipeline from the projects to the prison cell.”
“How can you say American isn’t racist when the Constitution says that black people only count for as 3/5 of a person”
“Of course there is systemic racism, but that doesn’t mean everyone isn’t racist” which was met with “NO!! Everyone is a racist!!”
“The 1619 project is a great resource to learn about racism” (helpfully offered by the SVP of HR)
“We can’t scream at people, we have to educate them” – the tone was so patronizing. The less enlightened need our help!
“Boo, shaking my head, I can’t believe you would say that” – to the one person who dared stray from the orthodoxy
There are two things that really frustrate me (well, more, but for now I will list two):
- I just want to go to work. I don’t have the time or energy to engage in this nonsense. But I can’t avoid it. The slack channels are full of it. It used to be you left religion and politics out of the workplace.
- The irony is that the whole premise is predicated on white power, that white males have power. In this case, I have no power at all. All the power is held by the CEO, the SVP of HR, and the rest of the C-suite, as they have the bully pulpit. I don’t want to lose my job, nor do I want to be a pariah at work, nor do I have the energy to argue. So I have to sit and listen to it. Now, don’t get me wrong; they all worked very hard to get where they are, and they deserve to have a bully pulpit – they have earned that right quite frankly. But it’s disingenuous to discuss “power structures” without acknowledging their own power in this conversation.
Sigh…
Published in General
I can’t quite put my finger on it, but the statement, “You will acknowledge your power or be fired,” seems a just bit self-contradictory.
Bullwinkle,
Quite a little “day at the office”. You were right to steer clear of these creatures. Don’t ever let their rhetoric fool you. They want blood. Instead, live today to fight again another day.
Regards,
Jim
We discussed this a bit in another thread, but the beginnings of a hostile environment lawsuit are there. It might take some more, but the seeds are planted.
Hoya,
Can you record a Zoom meeting if you aren’t the originator? It would be good to know.
Regards,
Jim
That’s not really in my lane, Jim. Zoom’s terms of service probably have something to say, as would laws on telecommunications such as phone calls. However, testimony as to the content of the meeting could be OK if you’re thinking evidence assuming it’s not seen as hearsay.
I think it’s safe to say someone in China records every Zoom meeting.
Is this a legal question or a practical question (I don’t know either way, but its worth specifying)?
“Psst, hey, VP. Come over here. Shhh. Seriously, the way you worded that. I think you’re opening us up to a major, major lawsuit here. I know one of the guys is a Republican, and has a neighbor who is a insane lawyer. And it’s trivially easy to record Zoom meetings. And if party talking points are quoted, well…”
Yep. Virtually all of HR policy is driven by a desire to avoid lawsuits, including stringent policies to prevent hostile work environment suits (“Please, no pictures of your significant other in a bathing suit” “And about that Merry Christmas ribbon”).
Inflicting a serious guilt trip on Caucasian employees is certainly a step in the wrong direction. The guilt trip should not be “severe and pervasive.”
A couple more videos about Struggle Sessions and the Cultural Revolution:
Don,
You read my mind.
Regards,
Jim
I doubt that the SVP of HR earned that position.
Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t get how “slavery” is meaningfully transmuted into the present, project-to-prison pipeline.
Slavery is supposed to be profitable for the slave-owner. Africans pressed into involuntary servitude in the United States were dehumanized and exploited because, at least in theory, it made various forms of agriculture more profitable for their owners.
In what universe is the project-to-prison pipeline profitable? The projects have to be paid for. Social programs are paid for. The lousy schools have to be paid for. The police and prisons have to be paid for.
Where is the return on all this investment? In this scenario, who is lounging on the porch drinking mint juleps?
I’m not so sure that’s right; there are a great deal of things you can’t say or command from a business owner position. Some are enshrined in law, most were a matter of understood rules (doubtless differently violated in ages past).
Perhaps complaints to shareholders or boards of directors about hostile work environments and being unable to meet deadlines based on this nonsense might move some people.
I am always amazed at the amount of non-work businesses engage in; and it’s uniformly miserable, from the wokest meeting to the morale-boostingest Christmas party. Why do companies want to be a “family”? Where did this perversity come from?
I want to give them the benefit of the doubt. The person has worked very hard, and seems to have genuinely made their way up the ladder.
Look out brother while you are giving them the benefit of the doubt they are setting you up for a ruthless purge. Don’t give them a target and start preparing to return fire if necessary.
Regards,
Jim
Gosh, GrannyDude, you just punched a hole in the BLM argument big enough to sail the Queen Mary through. Of course, you were using that evil “logic” thing. This is what is so wonderful about the postmodern epistemology. It is a never-ending kaleidoscope of stupidity that always ends up in the same place no matter what the facts are because the facts don’t matter.
Regards,
Jim
Just wait, we’ll make “making sense” a capital offense!
I think, and this is just a guess, that the plantation is not private agriculture, but the government. The product of the government plantation is not agricultural products that returns a profit by free commerce, but lives or bodies that return income via government taxes (as well as votes for the politicians that own the plantation). I don’t know what the profit margin was in slave days what with paying land taxes, and feeding, housing and clothing the slaves, and buying seed so forth, but today the government’s marginal profit has to pay the high-end salaries of 22 million government employees, or 7% of the US population (which is nearly twice the number employed in US private manufacturing).
For more, see CNS article.
But aren’t we talking about people who, by and large, don’t pay a lot of taxes?
The 22 million are government employees whose pay represents (in my analogy) the shareholders dividends. The cost of the plantation is, well, according to wikipedia, just “welfare” and “healthcare” spending costs 30% of revenue, or $2.2 trillion (but the charts are not clear).
And to answer Granny Dude’s question Pelosi, Schumer and the rest are drinking the mint juleps.
But the plantation analogy should mean that the people that are being complained about being exploited – the minorities being transitioned from bad schools to bad prisons – are the ones producing the income/profit. And that’s not the case here. Although I guess you could say that the income came from the customers of the product that the slaves – the underclass, here – produce. Now the “slaves” are producing poverty, which is being paid for by others – the non-underclass, mostly white or whatever – in their taxes. That’s perhaps an even worse thing than slavery was.
Well, let’s see.
The owners who sit on the porch and sip the mint juleps are the politicians.
The slaves are the unemployed (including prisoners) who receive food and housing from the owners. Their work is to vote for Democrats. And the crop is their votes. (And thusly we see the push now to have felons vote from prison.)
The shareholders are the salaried government employees that the owners give taxpayer money to.
The purchasers are the unwilling taxpayers who pay the owners for the crop of votes which they don’t actually want.
Here is the racial breakdown of who receives any welfare, but this doesn’t stipulate who actually receives the most per capita.
• White – 38.8%
• Black – 39.8%
• Hispanic – 15.7%
• Asian – 2.4%
• Other – 3.3%
From this source; https://brandongaille.com/welfare-statistics-by-race-state-and-payment/
I agree—but that isn’t (or doesn’t seem to be) where the #BLM folks take the argument. Cui bono would be a question worth asking, but it might provide for some discomfiting answers.
I suppose that the welfare-dependent are, in some sense, the “product” whose processing through the system creates wealth for some? Sort of the way sick people, as they pass through our healthcare system, create profits for nurses, doctors, heath insurance companies, hospitals, corporations who construct hospitals and medical equipment or dispose of medical waste.
GrannyDude,
So you are saying the plantation, as in slave times, was chiefly a profit center for the Democratic Party.
Regards,
Jim
But the people who… take care of?… the dependent are not, for the most part, making a lot of money from it.
I think they are. Government workers make considerably more than private sector counterparts.
I don’t want to be crass, but if the welfare dependent class were the product, the government would outlaw abortion. No, I think that the product is the votes, the slave work is the voting, and the payment for the product is made via taxation which is in apart used to pay the welfare fixed expenses of housing, food and minimal medical care.
Democrats and their allies in government establishment profit from it.