Accused of racism by client

[stample]

I work and deal with clients daily, I spoke to a regular client being polite and civil, and they too were civil back only to get home and email my manager saying I had implied a racist remark towards them. My manager knows this was not the case and responded back. For reference I am white with black children and the client was black (they wouldn’t know anything about my personal life)
AIBU to mention this when I next see them, obviously apologise if they thought what I said was racist and then to say my family are black…

Usually after a complaint the op won't be allowed to work with the client. I worked with someone who was accused of pushing her client she didn't lose her job but she could no longer work with that client.

She has received a complaint that she was being racist. I doubt she'll be able to work with that perticular client anymore. A colleague was accused of pushing her client. She didn't lose her job but she couldn't go near the client after that. They have to take all complaints seriously op won't lose her job. Whether you think it's right or wrong is really not up to me or you. Who knows maybe the op went in to work today and cleared it all up and had a meeting with the client and apologised.

How patronising. I’m expressing an opinion - what leads you to assume l’m hard of understanding ? Yes. And l understand that in the same way someone may say something they don’t perceive to be racist. If it’s pointed out that it’s genuinely sexist or racist then l think it’s important to acknowledge the offence inadvertently caused by that remark.

But l think it’s equally important for the offended party to acknowledge that no offence was meant and to explain why they found it racist. I don’t accept that a grovelling apology is needed simply because a person perceives something to be racist even when it isn’t. If I’m going to apologise for inadvertently causing offence then l need to know what the perceived slight was and why that person perceived it as such.

100% agree.

Imagine if a man’s response to a woman’s complaint about sexism was:

• ‘she’s playing the sexism card’
• ‘she’s probably trying to cause trouble’
• ‘some women see offence in everything’
• ‘get someone else to serve her’
• ‘just ignore her’.

What would we think of a man who responded in that way? Defensive? Dismissive? Unconscious? Uninterested?

Being anti-racist, or anti-discriminatory more generally, is a process or ongoing education, awareness and self-challenge. It’s hearing how people feel, encouraging and appreciating challenge, being resilient, acknowledging you should have been more aware and being keen to learn from it. People who don’t probably are discriminatory.

You sound like an excellent midwife 🙂

I guess that when i was reflecting on my ableism, what I had to learn not to expect is for people who I had offended to feel warmly about me.

The need to feel forgiven and validated by the person you've wronged is a common one, but not a realistic or ethical demand to make on someone who may feel hurt, humiliated or threatened.

You have to walk away from that encounter with new knowledge to make subsequent encounters a more positive experience for all.

Carry on!

A couple of weeks ago I bought 3 fillet steaks I was charged £21 at the butchers I am a white woman. My partner is a black man went into the same butchers choose the same size fillet steaks and was charged £28. After he kicked off they charged him £19.

My partner took his 3 year old BMW to be serviced the garage told him when he comes in for his MOT he will need all 4 sensors changed. They sent a quote for £740. I booked the MOT else where and explained to the garage what was said to my partner. He dropped it off and he pretended to be the neibour and my partner was on a business trip and he was helping us out. I was charged for two front sensors and the mot came to roughly £300. My partner has struggled for years in this town to find a decent mechanic.

It's what you don't see and the contempt that they have treated him without having said anything racist to him.

Not even if someone tells you that it could be construed as offensive?

I was really ableist too. As I mentioned upthread I am black, but didn't even stop to think about how ableist society is and how it could do much more to make the world more accessible. It wasn't until I heard someone speaking on these matters that a lightbulb went on. I would think that I still don't know or understand the half of it. I would guess that I have blindspots and am prone to make mistakes. I would hope that they would be met with grace and tolerance because of my openness and willingness to listen and learn.

What gets to me in discussions on racism is that people who really don't know the half of it because it is not their lived experience won't stop trying to convince us that things aren't the way we experience them, which is effectively gaslighting.

I think it stems from the very human thing of not wanting to admit you were wrong, or harmed someone, because it makes you feel guilty. And people don't know what to do with guilt. Especially when you can't fix it.

When you combine that with the very human need of wanting to be liked/admired/respected AND wanting to keep your job, there is a lot of incentive to double down.

This.

I don't know how, but I think we need to take the heat out of these discussions. Whenever I have pointed something out to someone they have become defensive and doubled down and said that I am accusing them of racism (even though I have never actually used that word against anyone because it is so loaded). They get so angry that they end up being the victim. And that's a real problem.

I once asked an organiser why there were no black people invited to a particular work event and they said that my asking the question made them feel "attacked". Of course they did. By their own guilt. But it was worth facing their angry defensiveness because the following year a few black people were part of the event.

It was probably an "oversight" on their part, but still...

no.

What the OP said wasn’t offensive in the slightest. FGS there are watermelons all over supermarkets the world over. She didn’t call someone a watermelon, she told the client that’s what the person ate.

There are absolutely some instances where someone should acknowledge if something is genuinely offensive, but there absolutely are instances where it is on the person using their situation to take offence

We can’t just decide that if someone is offended it is the person who said it that is in the wrong for not realising.

people can be offended by all kinds of shit. Sometimes they have reason to be, other times it’s on them. And in this instance it definitely was.

So the person who complained doesn't believe that the other person ate/eats water melon & that Op made it up as a racist slur?

Yes tbh, I rarely think anyone is being racist as such. Especially to me personally. The things that comes most often are incorrect assumptions about my culture and that is pervasive among everyone outside of my culture. The media are to blame for that.

But they aren't saying it because I'm Black, they're saying it because I'm Jamaican. I know for fact they say it to white Jamaicans because I know some.

For me, racism is more about when people incorrectly attribute traits to a group and form a bias towards that group people based on that. This can become a systemic bias. Racism largely ignores culture.

Op should not be held accountable? She offended her client she needs to address that. If someone who works in care can't be sensitive towards someone else's feelings then they need to find another job.

The watermelon is a red herring.

The problem is your certainty that you would know if it was or wasn't. It's like a man being certain something isn't sexist. It really might not be, but does he have the positionality to assess that with any accuracy?

Completely agree

Children often eat things at nursery/school they won't eat at home, that's a very common experience. My son ate plums and pears at nursery but would only eat apples at home and no other fruit. Talking to other mums they have found similar.

So if this is a parent of a young child with send, possible texture issues around eating etc.. they probably just really could not believe thier child ate some watermelon. And unfortunately it does have racist connotations so they put 2 and 2 together and came up with racism. I'm guessing, reading between the lines.

I would not mention your own children, or apologise. But just make it clear you were being truthful about the watermelon.

Why did you mention watermelon in particular? Quite an unusual item of food, was it on a list or something or something you mentioned out of the blue?

You know what I can imagine happening in my network of friends and family?

Someone has professional carers and the family are already anxious about delegating the care of their loved one to outside sources.

We've all seen the media with abusive carers, and whether you think we are irrational or not, non-white people fear racism from such figures as an additional motive/reason for substandard care.

So, my friends/family are already anxious and double checking everything, and then, for some reason, we think our vulnerable loved one hasn't been fed a meal. On top of that, the food documented is something like "jelof rice" which we know our loved one doesn't eat because a) it's a West African dish and we are Jamaican and b) they don't like spicy food despite being Black and Jamaican (these people do exist!).

It could be construed as you didn't bother to feed our relative and then made a gross assumption about what they might have eaten that day.

Were you racist? I have no bloody idea because your recounting of the incident was very opaque.

Comments like:

It doesn’t help that I live in a predominantly white area and everyone in the company is actually white Which is just coincidence.. Really, just coincidence 🙄 .

and

For reference I am white with black children. Are they giving out diplomas with black children now? Just how much heavy lifting do you think ‘with black children’ is doing in this statement.

I don’t know you but there’s a naivety coming from your posts, that doesn’t fill me with confidence about your skills in working with diverse communities.

Your managers off hand dismissal of the complaint was unprofessional.

My daughter is disabled. She has to remind me very occasionally that something I’ve said is ableist. Before I had her, I was totally unaware of abelism, and how much it was institutional and internalised. But when you think about how society is set up and how it excludes disabled people as a matter of course, it’s really easy to see how that happens. When she was about 2 and it was clear she wasn’t going to walk independently, we focused entirely on how we could make her walk, it was all consuming, everything was about getting her on her feet. Then we had the best neuro consult and who said our only job was to help her be, “the best her that she can be.” Our focus shifted from walking to mobility. How was she going to navigate the world, which wheels would be the best ones to help her. It was eye opening, because until then, we thought that walking was the only goal, not realising that having wheels would give her more independence, not less. That’s a very abelist view. When she was a bit older I would only use the language I thought I was the best language because I’d read up on it. When she was old enough to ask what she thought was appropriate, she had a totally different view on what was best to use for her. It wasn’t up to me to decide she was wrong.

When OP says she can’t be racist because her children are mixed race, it’s the same as me saying I can’t be abelist because I have a disabled child. It’s so not the case. The only thing I can claim is, I am not deliberately or intentionally abelist, but sometimes I might lack an awareness that what I’m saying is abelist.

But they choose the sex of the women they choose to make the children with. What’s your point?

Ahh so it’s up to me, the victim of racial abuse, to educate myself to ensure that the word I’ve been called throughout my life as a black person in the UK isn’t just coincidentally and innocently being used around me and my children?

Should I make a list? The N word? Black c*? Monkey chants? How do I go about my research when I travel to a new part of the Uk? Should I ask shopkeepers and locals- go through the list of racial slurs one by one and ask them if they use them as terms of endearment so I’m prepared? How does this education work in practice?

Have you ever considered how it feels to be called monkey, how distressing it was as a child? To still occasionally hear monkey chants directed at black footballs when I go to the matches? Or you’d rather place the burden on the victims of racism to ensure you don’t feel any discomfort by hearing about the existence and prevalence of racism in this country?

Boris Johnson has form for this, he made a speech in which he mentioned tribal warriors breaking out in "watermelon smiles". It was back in 2002 but got brought into the news again in 2019 when he became PM. Along with another speech mentioning "picaninnies". I think for us British, it was probably this that has raised an awareness of watermelon having racist connotations