Equal Opportunity Employer

They told me no.

They told me I was unqualified.

They told me such a thing was unprecedented.

They told me I wasn’t right for the job.

    They told me my people aren’t right for this job.

I called them racist bastards.

That really flustered them. You should have seen them stumble over each other trying to tell me that race had nothing to do with it. They could already see the media storm that little accusation would make if it reached social media. They came up with a hundred different reasons why they didn’t want to hire me, each followed up with a blurb about how race had nothing to do with it.

Every point they gave I countered with my resume, work history, and references. Then the unthinkable happened. They hired me. A voice in my back of my head told me they’d only hired me to avoid the bad publicity, but another voice countered that that didn’t matter. All that mattered was I got the job and practically made history.

“My kind” have only ever worked labor jobs. Making things and breaking things and serving things. Having someone like me on a sales/support tech line was unheard of. “My kind” doesn’t have social skills to be able to connect to the company’s customers to either help them or sell them something. Most people ranked us on the same level as dogs.

It’s hard to believe after all the segregation and all the speeches, the protests, the sit-ins, the marches that we can still live in a world so divided by one’s appearances and one’s beliefs. We all like to say we’re accepting and not prejudiced, but those old tendencies still like to flare up every now and then.

Put a large number of people of mixed races together and it’s only a matter of time until that one large group becomes many smaller groups of color or creed. In the end, people are no better than the cavemen and their tribes from thousands of years ago. Will it ever change? I’d like to say I’m hopeful, but I’m too much of a realist so I know the answer is no. Things may improve, biases will slacken, but humans will always be separated.

But I do not protest. I do not march and give great speeches at the feet of national monuments of freedom. I live my defiance simply by living. By doing the things that people said I couldn’t and by hearing the words spoken behind my back and smiling at the faces that speak those words. They are spoken out of fear and ignorance.

Here’s something to think about in situations like this; Treat them as if they were a dog. I know that seems counter intuitive to my complaint earlier about people thinking I was no better than a dog, but hear me out. Imagine approaching a dog and it starts to bark at you and gnash its teeth at you. Why does it do that? Well, because you’re a stranger and it’s afraid of you. It doesn’t know what you want and why you’re encroaching on its personal territory so it tries to attack you or at least frighten you off.

Now what do you do? Do you start yelling at the dog and threatening it? Do you kick it while saying “Don’t be afraid of me! I don’t want to hurt you!”? No, you bend down to its level and extend an open hand while speaking to it in a calm, rational voice. You show it you’re no harm and you treat it the way that you would like it to treat you.

And that’s what I do with my co-workers. I treat them with the kindness and respect that I would like to get from them. Does it do much good? I would have to say, not really. If anything it totally confuses them and throws them for a loop. They don’t know how to react when a savage treats them civilly. The most “good” I’ve seen come of it so far is those people choose to stop insulting me and treating me like a third rate citizen and instead just ignore me.

It’s not ideal, but I count it as a win.

It’s been a few weeks now and I’m settling into my job. So far I have had no customer complaints which I think really irritates some of the upper management. I think they hired me just to shut me up. I bet they were counting on a flood of people complaining that they had to talk to me that they would have a good enough reason to fire me before my first week was out. That way they could come out on top as the good and progressive guys, but I would lose my job on my own merits. “At least we tried,” they would say. And it wouldn’t just be me they were firing, they would be setting an example and showing proof that my people were no better than they already said we were.

But I had no complaints. I did my job perfectly and my customers were happy. My sales were actually above the average of the rest of my team. I was giving them no easy out for getting rid of me. My track record didn’t make any difference to the internal staff, though. I would still catch Nancy in accounting talking to Steve in web development that the sight of me sitting at my desk disgusted her.

Once I was in the breakroom getting ready to pour myself some coffee when I hear this “Uh…” behind me. I turn to see Bob Willis staring at me in disbelief.

“Hello, Bob,” I said politely.

“That coffee isn’t for you,” he said in return while adjusting the glasses on his nose. “It’s for us.” Us, of course, being everyone other than me. When he said it wasn’t for you he meant it wasn’t for your kind.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I put down the coffee cup and looked around for another pot. One that would be marked for me. “I don’t see another kind of coffee that would be for me.”

He shrugged. “Maybe it’s in another breakroom. Maybe the janitor’s closet.” He had a hard time containing a smug smile at his joke. “I didn’t even know you all drank coffee.”

“I just like the smell.” This really confused him. I left before he could say anything more. I didn’t like the rules, but I would play by them. My statement to the world was bigger than a cup of coffee.

I still try to look on the bright side of things. Most would still consider my workplace a hostile environment, but if they had been through the things that I have they would see that it has improved. The outright hostility has shifted to more of a begrudging acceptance and the looks of disgust have softened to the lowered brow of annoyance. True, there are still flare ups.

Yesterday, I came into work to find one of those wind-up cymbal playing monkeys sitting on my desk. The message was clear and the passive aggressive insult of my evolutionary chain could not have been more blatantly stated. But I don’t get mad. That’s what they want. Instead, I place the little guy on a shelf on my cubicle wall for decoration. Evolution be damned. That’s living in the past.

I do not let my past define me. I let myself define my future. Which…when you think about it, that can’t make sense. Because by the time I become my future self, I will have been defined by my current self, which at that time will have become my past self. Okay, maybe I’m not so good with the philosophical, but that’s alright. Philosophy and abstract thinking are difficult to program and are still new to robots such as myself.