It’s 2014! Someone needs to tell Tennessee it’s not 1854 anymore.
The supervisor who was making those racist remarks is away on vacation. I predict that when he gets back we’ll hear the “I was just jokin’ ’round” defense, as if that makes any difference.
I sincerely hope he get’s a message telling him not to bother coming back from vacation.
If this is a post-racial society, I’ll eat my hat.
Geez, Martin, you toooooooooooootally misunderstand.
The US certainly **was** a post-racial society, until some corrupt, vote-stealing sleezeball let a Black man into the Oval Office. Now there’s racism everywhere, but it target’s white guys. You can’t be toooooo surprised when, on those rare occasions when a white guy is higher up the corporate food chain, one of the targets of this hideous new racism gets a bit careless in his defense measures.
Sheesh.
What I want to know is, why didn’t his boss tell him to STFU? This goes way beyond even the “joking” kind of racism the assholes normally use. I don’t see how even a racist could see this kind of language as anything but an open invitation to a lawsuit and/or a firing.
Recording their supervisor was the real racism, dontcha know.
I wish this were as shocking as the article suggests.
And this man still has his job. I wish I could say I was shocked.
I assume Tennessee is now drafting legislation to forbid recording in the workplace as we speak.
The headline at the source is
instead of
as if the racism of the supervisor somehow remains an open question, or a point of discussion.
Sadly, not just America.
I think the idea is that “racist” is a direct quote from the worker… but… your point still holds.
He’s been fired, both from the warehouse and from the company where the management was outsourced to.
Too bad he doesn’t own his own NBA team and be forced to take a billion dollars for selling it. I bet he gets nothing for his insights.
Racism is alive and well in America. Driving home every day I tune in sometimes to my local right wing radio station to listen to callers. I’m constantly amazed by how utterly unconscious people are and so proud at the same time when expressing odious repellent points of view about minorities and immigrants. Makes me better appreciate how men must sound when they express equally odious and unconscious sexist attitudes about women all the time.
What? They didn’t have water fountains in 1854! Just going back to 1964 is sufficient for some places like rural Louisiana and 1954 for the whole South. I remember these things quite well.
@11: Enkidum, do you have a source for that?
I should have done a little extra checking before posting, whoops. From a link from the linked story:
http://wreg.com/2014/06/04/owner-of-cotton-warehouse-responds-to-racist-comments/
Well then what the hell use are you, asshole? You’re the owner, that means the buck stops with you. It’s your fucking responsibility to monitor the people you hire to run thing for you, if you’re too lazy and/or incompetent to do it yourself. Why else would you feel entitled to keep the money that comes in from other people’s hard work? I have no sympathy at all, and I hope he and the management company get hit with massive fucking fines for the settlement.
Uh huh. This is not at all the same thing as saying that this kind of thing hasn’t been going on before, just that no-one could prove it/thought they had a chance in court.
@17, Dalillama, Schmott Guy
Heh. This gave me my first genuine laugh of the day. You must not be from America, yourself, if you think that rich people have any responsibility here… or in the U.K…. or in France… or in Italy… or Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Peru… in fact, skip my list, and just watch this.
Come to think of it, where are you from, anyway?
Somehow, I just can’t get on with “shocking” given everything in the sentence after that word. Crap, it isn’t really shocking anywhere, unless you live in Denial.
Uh, there were a couple typos in the story about the owners response:
FTFT
yeah, why do you think no Black employee took them to court 60 years ago? Their radical pro-labor, integrationist approach to cotton farming, and the quick firing of bad apples, made it impossible for employees to want to sue, even when an occasional supervisor did fling racism like a monkey flings its poo? The family’s insistence on full medical benefits for all employees from the day they took over the cotton gin, and the general reluctance of employees to rock the boat at such a generous employer? Or maybe because the family is all psychic and predicted, 9 years before passage, the CRA of 1963? The bias in favor of Black testimony in courts of the Confederate South? The bias in favor of the poor, the renter, the serf, and the unemployed recently-fired in the courts, like, everywhere?
Or maybe no white supervisor ever hired by the family ever said anything racist to Black cotton gin employees from 1954 right up through last year.
Look we just have to go with the last one, right?
Right?
Fox has hit a new low. Now they are launching racist and extremely stupid attacks on Niel DeGrasse Tyson. It’s amazing how many right wingers are so proud of their ignorance. They even proudly endorse the sexist “wife beating” humor in the Honeymooners, as the good ol’ days. Anyway they prove Tyson’s point, right wingers prove there is no intelligent life on earth. No wonder that public understanding of science is so appalling. Check it out.
http://mediamatters.org/blog/2014/06/05/meet-the-hipster-racist-fox-news-guest-attackin/199617
Tennessee is well aware that it’s no longer 1854, and they can’t legally own slaves anymore. They’re not clear about it no longer being 1954.
Damn – Neil deGrasse Tyson, typed to fast sorry….
@ 17, Dalillama, Schmott Guy
No,no,no! He was shocked, shocked I tell you to think a racist comment could ever be uttered in the South. In the cotton industry.
@24 One would think given the history of the industry he would be careful not to say anything that could be construed as racist, but nope he says openly racist things.
I’m sure someone somewhere will claim that the supervisor was just taken out of context or “slipped up” but given this guy thought to bring a tape recorder with him implies to me this happens with some frequency.
From Ibis’s link @9
That would be some of that personal responsibility that the right wingers are always going on about. At least the workers got about about half of the award.
Shit. At 1:55 you can see the name, address, phone number, and birthday of the guy who filed the complaint. I suspect he is going to get harassed by a bunch of assholes now.
Vicar:
I’m not Dalillama, but please don’t forget that some people value their privacy and prefer not to reveal such information. Even asking could be seen as invasive.
Also, it doesn’t matter where Dalillama is from. The criticism and the point is still valid. As the owner of the cotton company, Mr. Atkinson *should* know if this kind of crap is going on.
Whether or not he (or owners of other companies) hold themselves by that standard is besides the point.
sugarfrosted:
(my bolding)
Given that it was recorded, claiming it was out of context won’t fly (I guess I should say is *shouldn’t* fly).
@28, Tony! The Fucking Queer Shoop!
For the humor-impaired: Dalillama can’t be from America, because everyone knows we don’t do things that way here. They don’t do things that way in any of the places in the list, either. But the list was literally everywhere in the world, so he can’t be from anywhere. “All Cretans are liars, one of their own poets has said so.”
That whooshing sound when you read the post? It was the joke going over your head.
(via Freethoughtblogs) #30
You have a rather silly ‘nym.
@31, chigau (違う)
Thanks, tell a friend.
@sugarfrosted,25:
It’s probably pedantic, but I am pretty sure the recordings were done with a smartphone, not a tape recorder. Which I think actually indicates that it could have been taking place for even longer, since it required a direct recording with 2010s technology to get the charge filed, rather than technology that has existed for a while longer.
A lot of it is likely because the systemic racism is still a big barrier and was even bigger the farther back you go, but some it may be because it simply wasn’t possible to get a recording (tape recorders are quite conspicuous and possible more difficult to use for this), meaning that they could dismiss charges as a black person’s words against a white person.
So not only is it very likely that this particular case is bigger than it looks because it happened enough that the employee decided to record future instances, but it’s also very likely that the company’s lack of charges filed against them doesn’t indicate that this hasn’t happened before.
Certain areas in the US South keep trying to make slavery happen again. Here is evidence of slavery, or slavery-like conditions, for blacks in the US South during the 20th century.
The rest of the US should not feel superior though. Consider Michelle Alexander’s book “The New Jim Crow”, which argues that the amazingly high levels of imprisonment of US blacks amount to a new form of slavery, a re-occurrence of the economic basis of slavery where blacks labored with no rights.
Well….
At least we now have definitive proof that time travel is possible?
The Vicar (vicar of what? Of no god on Earth?) has previously explained that this weirdness is purely for his own convenience: this way he knows if he’s logged in via FtB or via… I forgot, WordPress perhaps.
Still doesn’t make sense to me.
He’ll just take a cue from politicians and say “I misspoke” and not bother to elaborate on how he got to the racist comments from the perfectly acceptable thing he had meant to say.
There’s a word in the stories about this that needs a helluva lot more attention: “outsourced”.
The management of the company is outsourced to some other firm. The supervisor is technically not an employee of the cotton mill, but instead of the management company.
In theory, outsourcing is about saving money by cutting back on benefits and wages. And it’s true that most folks working for an outsourcing company make less than they would if they had just been hired by the company where they are outsourced to.
But I’ve long suspected that that was just the gravy on the big heap of win that outsourcing produces for companies like this. Namely, deflecting liability.
The owner of the mill is already pointing his fingers at the management company, basically saying he had no way to know what the manager was doing. (Meanwhile, the management company is pulling the usual, “Well, we fired him when we found out about it” defense, while ignoring their obligation to actively set a policy that would’ve let the harassment victims easily report the abuse.)
Most of these outsourcing companies operate on paper-thin margins. If a lawsuit looks like it’ll succeed, then they just fold. This dramatically limits the ability of victims of corporate malfeasance to gain compensation. Among the many, many reforms we need for this country is a law stating that if you hire another company to do work for you, and they in turn violate labor, environmental or other laws, then you subsume any liabilities for that activity they cannot pay. You hired someone to haul away your toxic sludge and only later found out that the reason they gave you such a great rate was that they were just dumping it in a river three counties over? Congrats, after the waste company folds, you get to pick up the rest of the tab for the clean-up.
@37, David Marjanović
Because, of course, the only reason to choose a pseudonym is to make sense to you. That’s why we have “Queer Shoop”, “(違う)”, and “Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden”. Right. 😒
What you just did? Is the equivalent of walking up to someone and telling them “that shirt is soooo stupid and dorky-looking”. An appropriate response to someone who did that would certainly be “f*ck off, nitwit”. Feel free to extrapolate.
Tell you what: you get Freethoughtblogs.com to figure out how to actually accept WordPress.com logins — something that they claim to do, but don’t, and which every other blog site seems to manage without problems — so that I no longer have to have a separate login for this site, and I’ll remove the part you seem to dislike so disproportionally. Until then, you may consider that string of characters to be either a somewhat transitory monument to technical incompetence or a deliberate personal affront to nitwits.
David Marjanović
See. Perfectly clear, no?
Yet another proud moment in my home state’s history, and it wasn’t even Governor Haslam who did it this time. SCOTUS was absolutely right in their voting rights decision. Racism is dead and buried in the U.S. Nothing to worry about here.
Sorry I didn’t return to this thread sooner.
Oops. I had quoted your smiley, which somehow cut the whole comment off. ~:-| Trying again…
░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░
Sorry I didn’t return to this thread sooner.
…All of those, as it happens, make sense to me, because the people who chose them explained them, without even being asked.
Why do you extrapolate so far from “doesn’t make sense to me”???
It just means “I can’t explain it any further”. You weren’t here, so I couldn’t simply wait for you to answer.
Even when I write less than one line, people still try to read between my lines. Unbefuckinglievable!
Why do you extrapolate from “weirdness” to disliking it disproportionally? The person who called it a “silly ‘nym” was chigau, I only quoted her.
The part I asked an actual question about was “Vicar”. Curious as I am, I’d still be thankful for an answer.