I remembered being the only Asian kid in school on Long Island. It was awful. The constant fights/bullying I was in were so frequent that my parents sent me to defense training.
My teachers would put me down and one of my teachers even physically abused me. The vice principal saw it and didn’t do anything either.
But I felt privileged because I wasn’t the only black kid in my school. He was my best friend. He had it way worse.
My point is that it is all about perspective. My life sucked because I knew what my friend was going through.
Obviously it’s not your fault. You’re the product of your environment. Racism is sorta built into everything in our society.
I’ll give you an example that relates to your post.
I work in a small startup and manage a marketing team. Our team is growing and I’m constantly hiring people.
Our founder plans to go public, but our diversity % is awful. We have 2000 employees, 8 blacks, 14 Asians and 80% men. The vast majority of them are white men. The head of HR is a friend of mine and asked me for help.
I told her one of the many reasons was the college graduate and masters preferred line we have on all our postings. It didn’t even matter that it’s a junior position. That was added because they wanted “educated” people. But we inadvertently homogenized all our candidates.
As a test, we changed all marketing positions to just say high school or GED. And with that simple trick, marketing is the most diverse department in the company.
The only thing we can all do as a society is to just try our best to bring diversity to our lives. I was a “don’t bother me and I won’t bother you” type of person when it came to LGBTQ people until I found myself living in West Hollywood and making friends with mostly gay people.
I remembered being the only Asian kid in school on Long Island. It was awful. The constant fights/bullying I was in were so frequent that my parents sent me to defense training.
My teachers would put me down and one of my teachers even physically abused me. The vice principal saw it and didn’t do anything either.
But I felt privileged because I wasn’t the only black kid in my school. He was my best friend. He had it way worse.
My point is that it is all about perspective. My life sucked because I knew what my friend was going through.
I’m sorry you went through that.
That’s the kind of thing I didn’t think about growing up, which was in a primarily white area, and I only really made non-white friends in university.
I feel embarrassed at what I thought back then sometimes.
Obviously it’s not your fault. You’re the product of your environment. Racism is sorta built into everything in our society.
I’ll give you an example that relates to your post.
I work in a small startup and manage a marketing team. Our team is growing and I’m constantly hiring people.
Our founder plans to go public, but our diversity % is awful. We have 2000 employees, 8 blacks, 14 Asians and 80% men. The vast majority of them are white men. The head of HR is a friend of mine and asked me for help.
I told her one of the many reasons was the college graduate and masters preferred line we have on all our postings. It didn’t even matter that it’s a junior position. That was added because they wanted “educated” people. But we inadvertently homogenized all our candidates.
As a test, we changed all marketing positions to just say high school or GED. And with that simple trick, marketing is the most diverse department in the company.
The only thing we can all do as a society is to just try our best to bring diversity to our lives. I was a “don’t bother me and I won’t bother you” type of person when it came to LGBTQ people until I found myself living in West Hollywood and making friends with mostly gay people.