I have a caveat to add to the author's assertion that discussing race becomes easier with practice. That's not always true in the short run, but I agree that it is in the long run, assuming good faith on both sides.
What I've found is that it depends on so many variables between the people wanting to have the discussion that it's entirely unpredictable how it will turn out - and often unpredictable even if it's the same two parties with discussions separated by time.
I'm a white man married to a black woman. We've known each other over 35 years. We've had discussions on many aspects of the racial divide over the years, of course. I think that I understand her point of view as a black woman much better now than I did in the '80s, or '90s, or '00s, though even today she may say that I just don't get it. (And I think she understands where I'm coming from better, too.)
But the effort has been worth it. It's just very, very difficult sometimes to have such discussions.
As far as the substance of his experience with the interviewer, sadly, I completely believe it and am not even surprised. The author handled himself with dignity at every step. It had to take a lot of courage to tell it straight when the session on interviewing brought it all back up years later. So what everyone went silent? Their discomfort isn't comparable to what I suspect his was.
Telling the truth is always worth it, especially when it's hard. Hopefully sharing his negative experience helped at least one person in that session to reconsider what they probably considered to be long-settled (and probably vague) opinions about their own rightness in this regard.
tl;dr: It's easy to learn to avoid saying what you really feel and think when you're in a work environment and you know there could be repercussions. It's hard to challenge yourself and others to go beneath the surface, but the rewards are great.
> "It's hard to challenge yourself and others to go beneath the surface, but the rewards are great."
The author of the post seems entirely reasonable and I'd love to have a discussion with him about this type of stuff.
The problem, at least for me, is that it's difficult to tell upfront who's reasonable and who is not. What I mean by reasonable is someone who will put forward an honest effort to have a discussion, as opposed to deliberately trying to insult the other party (like the CEO from the article), or deliberately trying look for unintended missteps and immediately paint the opponent as some kind of racist monster (like some POC).
I used to be quite honest about these things; now with more experience I think I am less so.
This seems really sad, and like a step backwards, but I don't really see how to solve it without somehow being able to guarantee the other party will cooperate. Of course, if it is your wife, I'm sure you trust her a lot and she trusts you as well, which facilitates the discussion. However, realistically the vast majority of these discussions will be between people who not only don't trust each other as much, but they might even see each other as foes/adversaries.
In that scenario, I'm not sure it's a good idea to "challenge yourself [...] to go beneath the surface".
While in general, there are sometimes people who feel put upon and don't feel like answering questions and/or having that difficult discussion of race, a job interview isn't the place to have it.
The power dynamic is too skewed for you get anything like a real answer to your question. If the question was designed to see how the interviewee handles pressure than that's a shit move to do.
Either way it's a terrible question. Also, it's an unfair one because other white applicants aren't getting this question. By definition, there really isn't a way for a white interviewer to be able to judge how well the interviewee responded to "Why isn't it OK to say nr". It can easily end up feeling like a personal judgement or worse a judgement on a person's entire race of which there is no way they could represent every perspective.
The fact that it was in a job interview just shows the that interviewee either didn't understand the context of the question which is strong evidence that they are probably a bad manager or they didn't care, which is even stronger evidence of a bad manager.
"The fact that it was in a job interview just shows the that interviewee either didn't understand the context of the question which is strong evidence that they are probably a bad manager or they didn't care, which is even stronger evidence of a bad manager."
By "they" you mean the CEO, right? Because it scans as though you mean the interviewee.
I agree, and I certainly wasn't trying to promote the idea of striking up such conversations with someone you barely know just for the sake of personal development.
I've had far fewer such discussions with friends and coworkers, though I've had some. Mostly they have turned out OK, but I've been burned a few times too. And I didn't actively seek the conversations; rather, they always occur when something happens in a shared environment and usually later one of us makes a comment about it that leads to a discussion.
I would like to think that this is good advice, but I can't truly believe it because in many situations where the power dynamic is unequal, the rewards are greater for one person and the risks mostly go the other way. This decision of how open to be depends on how much risk you can tolerate for your survival (here, survival in a job, or a career or field, but sometimes actual survival.) It isn't necessarily about lying but about how open you are willing to be in a situation.
The CEO was very offensive and way out of line by asking such racially-tinged questions in a technical interview but I think people in the US go way overboard when it comes to the N word. It's essentially treated like the V word in Harry Potter which it's ridiculous and childish. People can't even refer to it in order to discuss it. College professors can even lose their jobs for talking about it in a classroom. I mean, Obama got some bad rap for talking about it on some interview. It's insane. And it's all cosmetics since the actual roots and possible solutions to the racial divide are rarely ever talked about or dealt with.
What I've found is that it depends on so many variables between the people wanting to have the discussion that it's entirely unpredictable how it will turn out - and often unpredictable even if it's the same two parties with discussions separated by time.
I'm a white man married to a black woman. We've known each other over 35 years. We've had discussions on many aspects of the racial divide over the years, of course. I think that I understand her point of view as a black woman much better now than I did in the '80s, or '90s, or '00s, though even today she may say that I just don't get it. (And I think she understands where I'm coming from better, too.)
But the effort has been worth it. It's just very, very difficult sometimes to have such discussions.
As far as the substance of his experience with the interviewer, sadly, I completely believe it and am not even surprised. The author handled himself with dignity at every step. It had to take a lot of courage to tell it straight when the session on interviewing brought it all back up years later. So what everyone went silent? Their discomfort isn't comparable to what I suspect his was.
Telling the truth is always worth it, especially when it's hard. Hopefully sharing his negative experience helped at least one person in that session to reconsider what they probably considered to be long-settled (and probably vague) opinions about their own rightness in this regard.
tl;dr: It's easy to learn to avoid saying what you really feel and think when you're in a work environment and you know there could be repercussions. It's hard to challenge yourself and others to go beneath the surface, but the rewards are great.