Renee: Higher Education

Every morning I watched my boss, Joe, walk down the line of offices in the administration building. He stops in the two before mine, and appears distracted as he moves past mine. I hear him saying “good morning” to the next three after which he briskly walked past my door again as he headed back to his suite at the end of the hall. This behavior is repeated most days for a few weeks. I decided that I would present an interruption to the pattern when hearing him come down the hall one morning from my neighbor’s office, I step into my executive assistant’s office out by the door. As I am about to initiate a “good morning,” he turns on his heels, and walks back to his office suite. (Guess my neighbors down the hall missed out on a greeting that morning since I stepped to the door.) In my one-on-one that week, I recanted these observations to which he responded that he had not noticed, and that his behavior was not intentional. I told him that just to bring some levity to my reality, I went to my colleagues around me and asked, “Can you see me?” I was beginning to feel like Jim Carey in the movie where he believed he was invisible. They first looked puzzled. “What!” was the usual fist reply. I would say, “It is really nice for Joe to do morning check-ins, isn’t it?” A couple of the heads dropped. “Did you do something to make him angry?” one colleague asked. I responded, “Yep, I showed up to work.” I told Joe that my colleagues noticed.

From that time on, he stopped the morning ritual.

Being ignored, made to feel invisible, have my opinions about a project only matter if one of my white—usually male—colleagues expressed value in my suggestions. I was younger in my career at that time. I was not aware that it would continue to be the case.

Different characters, different plantations, but pretty much the same or similar behavioral manifestations of racism and exclusive practices that plague organizations even today.