On an email with my manager I described a coworker I only worked with once as a small, thin woman that was either born in an East Asian country or has East Asian parents. I don’t know this person’s name. I don’t see a better way to describe her all things considered.
The managers answer: it is disrespectful to describe people according to ethnic background or physical appearance.
My next question for this manager: dear manager, how should I describe this person then?
I don’t know if I’m being genuinely disrespectful or this is a very thin skinned manager. Either way, I had to work with another coworker I didn’t know either. This conversation with manager B ensued:
manager B: ‘today you’re working with mike’
me: ‘who’s mike?’
manager B: ‘that fat guy’
make it make sense.
In the last few decades we’ve noticed that we’ve been treating each other like shit. We’ve used race, skin colour, ethnicity, weight, etc to insult others and reduce their social standing.
We’re trying to fix that. As such, calling out those specific differences is frowned on, even if we aren’t using them negatively.
Is this inconvenient? Yes. It’s pretty easy to point out the only black/fat/disabled person in a work place. But we’re really trying to avoid any conversations that could turn into insults or attacks.
So we now have an unwritten social rule that we avoid using those identifiers when talking about individuals.
You clearly don’t live in the US if there is only 1 fat person in the workplace.
The baseline just changes
You’re making a good point, but I think it’s also equally pretty weird to just dismiss a facet of someone’s humanity. It feels a little bit to me like the whole “I just pretend everyone is white”-approach.
I think there’s too much nuance to make a hard rule on it. I’ve worked with someone who’s go-to way to describe people was always ethnicity/perceived nationality-based to a weird extent, never with anything negative, but it was still jarring. Like he would say “the Bosnian guy who works with Steve” instead of "the guy who works with Steve ".
I would also find it strange if someone treated someone’s race like it was a bad word. Like, I think it would be fairly natural to say “what’s the name of the black guy who works in the shop?”, and much less natural to say “whats the name of the person in the shop who often wears black pants, and said they were a fan of that new TV show, and they said they were from Oklahoma, and …”
I agree that it’s awkward and it creates problems in some scenarios. I’m not sure it’s necessarily a bad thing, but it’s an understandable (over) correction for some pretty heinous behaviour.
I think it’s also equally pretty weird to just dismiss a facet of someone’s humanity.
At work? I think it’s preferable to limit our interactions to work related stuff.
Outside of work, I’m ambivalent. We associate physical features, names, and accents with cultures. But those don’t always line up to significant differences in someone’s personality.
Calling the guy fat. Yeah kind of rude.
The way you described the lady. No nothing wrong with it.
Now if your comment was: just like people from Asia, good with math and impossible to understand.
Then yeah rude.
But how you said it. I’d say thin skinned manager. You described her in a way that it would be easy for your manager to figure out who you were talking about.
Also you are asking Lemmy, so I’m sorry but you are automatically wrong.
The way you described the lady. No nothing wrong with it.
If that’s the actual phrasing he used, I think it was pretty weird. Not necessarily offensive, just weirdly specific in a strangely technical way. Something like “the small Asian lady” would get the point across while sounding less like you’re some kind of robot or alien trying to classify her as a research specimen.
And the bit about either being from an Asian country or having Asian parents is kind of weird, for all OP knows her family might have been in the country for generations. People have a tendency to view people of Asian descent as a sort of perpetual foreigner, and that phrasing kind of feels like it’s playing into that.
“East Asian” also feels needlessly specific. How likely is it that there’s other women who otherwise fit the exact same description but are of, say, southeast Asian descent that OP needs to differentiate her from? I also think it’s probably the kind of distinction a lot of people just won’t understand. At least in the US I know I’ve had to explain what I’m talking about when I’ve talked about southeast Asia for example, a lot of people just don’t think that much about geography, let alone know about the cultures and physical characteristics of people from different regions.
It just all feels like a weird way to describe someone. Personally, I wouldn’t take it as rude, but it would definitely make me think that the person saying it is pretty odd and socially awkward.
It’s disrespectful to refer to someone as “the fat guy” too, perhaps moreso.
I’m not sure exactly what you said, but if it was “a small, thin woman that was either born in an East Asian country or has East Asian parents”, then that’s pretty weird.
It may have also been unnecessary to describe the person at all. It depends on the context.
It’s disrespectful to refer to someone as “the fat guy” too, perhaps moreso.
As a fat dude, I think it’s a perfectly valid way to describe me. It’s not insulting nor in this case used to be derogatory, it’s just a fact.
I didn’t say it wasn’t valid, I just said it’s disrespectful. Generally, it is. While you’re ok with it, not everyone who’s fat is ok with it.
Send them a link to a game of guess who and ask them how you are supposed to figure out the coworker without using descriptive words.
If they want to hard make your boss describe them to you instead of you describing them so it is their problem not yours
You: hey boss I worked with a person do you know who I’m talking about?
Boss: there are three people here.
You: tell me about them so I can tell you who it was.
At a workplace, aren’t there other identifiers? Their job title, their boss, how long they’ve worked there etc that can be used to identify them?
Who’s Mike? He’s in the sales team under Sally. I’ll introduce you.
Little Britain pokes fun of this sceanrio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrFBBCFrKaY
I don’t know, but if you put some more effort into remembering people’s names you don’t have to get into these situations in the first place. I say this as someone who’s terrible at remembering names, but I have gotten better at it, and so can you.
Also, most times it’s fine to just say “a coworker” without specifying who it is unless people ask.
Removed by mod
And yet its how I see it used in Vancouver area by people of different ethnic backgrounds. Walk into Best Buy and ask for something specific, Sikh greeter says look for the brown guy near the iPads.
