Work event.. left me out of the planning

[Notthattimeofthemonth]

We have a work day out next month and they have asked us to bring in a baby picture and they are going to guess who’s who to get us all networking.

I’m the only black person out of 126 people going so wouldn’t take them very long to guess who’s who.

im trying to calm down before I address this as I’m currently infuriated.

how on earth do I proceed with this in the correct way..

This is not accurate. It has been completely discredited but regularly pops up as a nice bit of whataboutery. Irish 'slaves' were indentured servants and were free to leave after 7 years. The entire population of Ireland in the 1600s was only about 1 million, so claims that 300,000 were transported as slaves just do not stack up.

www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN23Q1KO/

@Livelovebehappy think along the lines of unconscious bias. Racism isn't just doing something obvious against someone who's black. It's often a lot more subtle than that and many people won't see they are doing it unless they challenge themselves.

I can certainly see "Well, it's easy to see which baby is you tee hee" which just underlines the fact she is the only black employee.

I’m commenting on this specific post, not racism in general. In my opinion, and the OPs it seems, this situation wasn’t a racist one. Your opinion is different, and that’s okay too……

I’m just not seeing that this person who organised the activity would consciously or unconsciously pick out this activity with the intention of humiliating or embarrassing OP because she’s the only black person. I stick with my opinion that rather than it being racist, that it was at worst thoughtless and not an intended dig against OP. But it’s irrelevant what either of us thinks happened here, we don’t know the colleagues OP works with - so we can’t judge someone we don’t know. We can’t project our own experiences on someone else’s situation.

I don’t have any pictures of me as a baby, which sometimes me feel a little sad.

All these ice breaking/team building activities are nonsense. It's just wankery, and painful wankery at that.

The OP is being singled out, whether intentional or not, somebody should have realised. I'm white and I'd be very uncomfortable in a situation like that. I don't look anything like my baby photos, but if only one staff member isn't white it's very obvious which baby picture is theirs.

No need for guessing, banter with colleagues, talking about baby clothes which indicate the decade they were born in etc. It's over before it's started.

Apologies, I haven't read all the posts but I'm sure this has already been pointed out. I'm just say "There isn't really much point in me bringing in a photo, is there?" and leave it at that.

I can totally understand why you feel this way. It's thoughtless at best.

As per @Foodusername a majority stand with you. And thinking of my own workplace, a "guess the baby" game where there's only one black person would not have got off the ground, we'd find some other way to fawn over baby pics.

Most people don't intend to humiliate anyone and they don't intend to be racist. Racism doesn't always have intention but it's ingrained in society. Sometimes racism is what you don't do. You can of course keep referring to this example here and insist as you do, but your language tells me very clearly that your understanding of racism is basic.

It doesn't have to be intentional to be racist. Forgetting about the presence of certain people is what makes it "-ist". Not giving any consideration to certain people is what makes it "-ist". Not caring about the feelings of certain people is what makes it "-ist".

Like organising a celebratory night out at a strip club for 125 men and 1 woman.
Like organising a rock climbing team day out for 125 able-bodied people and 1 wheelchair user.
Like playing a game of Guess The Baby with 125 white people and 1 black person.

it's actually a ridiculous idea and not just for you @Notthattimeofthemonth

imagine someone was adopted or brought up in care or refugees fleeing war = no baby pics

or was neglected by parents = no baby pics

even worse = someone with a disability/genetic disorder which means they were in a wheelchair/has distinct features ....

and although I am gc, if someone transitioned, pre transition pics could be triggering for them especially in a public setting

whoever thought of this idea needs a top up diversity training

I don't think this should be restricted to a Black MNers group. While I'm sure some of the responses here have been challenging for you, OP, I also think you've started a dialogue and that's no bad thing. People following this thread may just challenge similar company activities in future. Yes, it's a small win but small wins do add up.

This. Just because you didn't do it on purpose doesn't mean it's not racist.

Actually, and in some ways more relevantly, I'd argue that it's impossible to organise any kind of ice-breaker for a meeting with 126 people in it. The idea (as said by the OP) is to network - but no-one is going to get to know the other 125 people in the course of one meeting, even if it's a day-long one.

Anyway, I hope you're feeling OK @Notthattimeofthemonth, and you've been encouraged/reassured that your response to this is definitely not wrong!

I am more shocked that out of 126 employees, only one is black. Given how diverse society is these days I find that puzzling. Are they filtering out black candidates in the recruitment process?

This is literally what unconscious bias is/does- filters out people who look or are different.

I never quoted 300,000 - I was referencing the following:

"The Irish slave trade began when 30,000 Irish prisoners were sold as slaves to the New World. The King James I Proclamation of 1625 required Irish political prisoners be sent overseas and sold to English settlers in the West Indies."

I was thinking that too. Unless it turns out that there is a fair few people of Asian heritage for example, just not black. I think when companies look at diversity quotas they just focus on making sure a respectable proportion of employees are not white, not straight, not able bodied or not NT. So it's possible it could be very diverse overall, just not very strong on black representation specifically. Perhaps it's fairly realistically representative of the area the OP lives in, in terms of black representation. 1 black person in 125 people where I live is probably about right. But depending on the job/company, I'd expect to see many more non-white and/or non-British people working there.

If it is full of white people with only one non-white person in total, that would be very unusual indeed, almost anywhere in the country now. Apart from somewhere like the Shetland Islands perhaps.

It is also different in that I can show you baby photos of me with a sun hat on and you can't see my ginger hair. My husband will always look brown in his baby photos so I could, and have, participated in this sort of thing but unless he was working with a diverse racial group he couldn't. He joined the police in the 1960s and I can assure you in all his early photos e.g. his initial training group, promotion photos etc he stands out as the only brown person. Finding him in a photo from then really isn't going to be much of a game.

The redlegs in Barbados are still a very underprivileged group I believe.

I live in South Devon, this was pretty much the situation where I used to work, I retired this year. Slightly different figures with roughly 100 to 110 employees, at one time we had one black colleague, the highest number was 2 and for a long time we had no black colleagues at all. So not exactly the same but pretty close.

I’m with you on this OP and I hope that your talk with your boss goes well.

The discredited article you linked states 300,000. I suggest you read the fact checking Reuters link I shared and read a bit further round the origins of the one you shared. The very concept of trying to compare indentured servitude to the slave trade is racist - are you?

I was responding to the comment that it’s akin to someone with unique features being spotted easily. It’s not the same.

In one of my previous posts I’ve said that I doubt it’s purposeful - it’s an oversight. But one that could have very easily been avoided but now the OP is in this horrible situation where she has to second guess herself, work out how or if to broach it, or tolerate the horrible ‘othering’ and potential micro aggressions or blatant racism that might come up as a result.

The point is that this kind of thing is the stuff that people of colour have to deal with constantly.

I work in an area that is still very homogeneous and not very diverse at all so my workplace is the same. It reflects the demographic make up of the area rather than a racist bias in the selection process.