I’m hopeful Maddow’s words reached Megyn’s ears though there certainly won’t be a retraction.
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Rachel Maddow To Megyn Kelly: Racist Work Emails Are Actually Pretty Weird
(R) is for (R)acist!
jw1
Yeah, I think that’s true most places. Megyn Kelly’s statement speaks volumes about Fox News.
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I’ve been in the corporate workforce since the early 90’s. Any one of those emails, and actually a lot less than what was shown as examples, would be grounds for immediate termination in any Fortune 500 company in America, except Fox apparently.
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Please stop blaming the Confederacy for this. There were plenty of racists in the northern states even in 1865. That’s part of the reason that they didn’t push all that hard for Reconstruction.
The Confederacy grew out of a racism that was already endemic in this country when the Constitution was written. It did not cause it.
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One of the things an employer cannot allow is for its workplace to be hostile to minority groups. Tolerance of racist emails is evidence of workplace hostility. I don’t know about your business, but if we discover racist emails in among an employee’s emails that employee is going to have a long talk with human resources and his or her supervisor. That talk is going to be longer if it is discovered the emails have been shared with other employees.
Of course, my company is trying hard to treat its minority employees with respect. Maybe Fox doesn’t give a fig whether it treats all of its employees with respect. or not? I suspect more companies are like mine than Fox News.
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No, I think you need to study up on history. The theory of racial inferiority was endemic throughout America, but it was the Constitutional roadblock of two Senators per state and 3/5th of each (non-voting) slave counting toward Congressional representation that kept the slave states slave, not the apathy or racism of northerners. I think you misunderstand Reconstruction, too. Most opposition from Union citizens was because it was not tough enough in punishing ex-CSA states, not because of antipathy to freed blacks.
I just spent a brief vacation in Florida. As a northerner, I heard more racist and anti-immigrant statements in a week than I’ve heard in the last 5 years back up north. So no, it’s a confederacy problem. Those people really, really like to blame minorities for everything.
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I’ve owned a small business, worked at several private sector companies, and spent many years working for two different government agencies. These emails would not be considered “normal”, and would definitely be grounds for disciplinary action (firing).
Then again, none of those places were teeming with right-wing assholes.
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Conservative journalists are entitled to their facts.
I think you’re on to something, here!
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If her words reached just one of Megyn’s ears, they could pass through the cranium directly to the other ear, unobstructed by any gray matter.
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Well, I’ve worked in a lot of places, including the front office of a Republican elected official, and I have never gotten a racist email at any of these places. Not even those “crazy right-wing uncle” type forwards. Everyone used private email for private emails.
Not normal. People would have been fired for that, because, duh, that’s bad for the organization.
But I suppose if you work for an organization that supports racism, maybe there aren’t any rules against that, and so you naturally think every other employer also likes employees to share racism.
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It would be interesting to know how many of the racist/anti-Obama emails and pictures originate at FOX, or at least get a big bump along the right wing distribution chain.
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I’m pretty sure 7-11 wouldn’t be okay with employees sending racist emails on the company email list.
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Yep. In all my years of working, I’ve only received those types of e-mails from one person - but she sent them out constantly. Even after I asked her to take me off her distribution list. And what do you do when it was something forwarded from your HR director?
So you’re saying that if a doctor shined one of these into one of Megyn’s shell-like ears, you’d see the light on the other side of her head?
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Do that on a .mil address and prepare for a high level of unpleasantness. You don’t diss the Commander in Chief.
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That’s what is more commonly known as a, “Take Out Your Checkbook” comment. As in, should you want to push it, you can sue your employer in either state or federal court. Here in California it only takes a one-page form filled out for the states Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH), or it’s federal counterpart to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and you will have a whole host of either state or federal investigators giving you a prostate exam for the next three months. This is regardless of private or public sectors.
Unfortunately, you might have managers/executives in an organization that will create a corporate culture of intimidation related to federally protected class harassment… or even employees who choose to just ignore what’s going on around them for fear of their job, or possibly because they agree with it. That doesn’t mean an employee still can’t take their employer to court and sue the living daylights out of them. All employers have policies stating you can be immediately terminated for employment discrimination as a means of controlling liability from being sued into oblivion… this is why current employers will generally step down hard on any employees who act in this manner.
A very politely worded personal email back explaining your discomfort with the subject of the email should suffice. Then you print out a copy of that email yourself, or blind copy it to your personal email account. If it happens a second time, that HR Director will be the next contestant on the “Pull Out Your Checkbook” game.
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These TeaBaggers are operating straight out of a Dixiecrat playbook, with all the trimmings.
There are plenty of racists to go around. Including racists in Mexico, for that matter (whom I combat with a vengeance which I cannot express with Americans).
But the existence of racism in places other than the Confederacy did not negate its racism, any more than the genocide of Native Americans on the Trail of Tears negate it in other localities in this country.
Finally, in light of the carnage the TeaBaggers are inflicting upon the United States, using as many metaphors associated with Jim Crow as possible, I believe it would be a heavy lift convincing those most traumatized by the Confederacy to opine that your assertion that “the Confederacy did not cause racism” would make them feel very much better
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As one who wrote corporate employee email policy for a company that began using email in the mid-90s-- I can say that the tenets of that policy were the same ones commonly accepted.
It boils down to telling new hires–
'Don’t send anything in an email you don’t want your mother-- or our lawyers-- to read.
jw1
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