Your Racist Office Friend

After undergrad graduation, I spent a few months bouncing around various menial desk jobs at the University of Alabama. My duties at these jobs consisted of light typing, filing, phone answering, and enduring veiled overtures from my colleagues to determine if I was as racist as they’d prefer me to be.

Reading the room for racism is not unique to the South by any means, but it was something I’d gotten used to as a fairly milquetoast would-be progressive white guy. Clearly I was a college kid hired for cheap labor, and yet I presented as something of a cipher: I had longish hair, not out of the question for a good ol’ boy, and I had no visible piercings. But neither did my t-shirts sport any Confederate insignia (or even any Alabama logos). Where did my loyalties lie?

Despite by liberal politics I was not spoiling to fight about racism on the job. I never witnessed anything truly heinous, but casual racist jokes, slurs, anecdotes about lazy black people or shiftless black kids? Oh yeah, all the time. I didn’t laugh along, I didn’t encourage it, but about the bravest I ever got was to walk away. Not something I’m proud of, at all.

Now please bear in mind I still love the South and I have deep affection for Alabama. But back then, and probably even now, my default assumption around most working-class white people in Alabama is that they may be racist, at least a little bit, and even if they’re not racist they’re not going to make a big deal about other people acting racist in their presence. And they’re probably not interested in hearing about progressive racial politics, from me or anyone else, in a professional or any other setting. This is not a political judgment, but rather, a completely unfair and yet anecdotal social assumption on my part that I have tried to shed along with my other prejudices, however statistically correct it might seem sometimes. Which is not to equivalence this prejudice with actual racism, of course.

So, back then, in a work situation my general policy was to not say much about politics or race unless I heard or perceived someone else say something sympathetic. On the flip side, even back then, office racists were still somewhat careful about acting racist in front of coworkers they weren’t sure about, racism-wise. Even in a very conservative environment, most racists knew to be a little circumspect at work, at first.

Usually this is approached sideways, where the office racist mentions something kinda racist-adjacent to gauge your reaction. In my case, at this office in Alabama, the racism ex machina was the recent opening of a Mercedes-Benz plant in the region. The new plant was hiring thousands of workers, which inspired a gold rush of would-be laborers. The middle-aged white lady receptionist in the office had several friends and relatives applying for jobs there, and she often regaled me with their progress or lack thereof in getting hired. Then, apropos of nothing, she passed on an assessment from one family member that Mercedes-Benz was hiring a lot of black people, and that white people were getting unfairly shut out.

I have no idea what Mercedes-Benz was doing with racial diversity at the time, or how many black employees was too many, according to my coworker’s relative. But that sense of grievance was the thin end of the wedge with her, and I guess she took my neutral reaction for consensus. Soon all her stories about Mercedes-Benz led with this or that white person getting passed over due to their race. I didn’t feel like confronting her, but I was also sick of hearing it. So I made some dumb crack about not expecting the Germans of all people to mistreat white people. I don’t think she even grasped what I meant, and it didn’t discourage her in the least.

Another popular way to sneak racist esprit de corps into your work relationship is to talk about topics emotionally popular with racists, and at this office, one guy’s special subject was his gun collection. He also suffered some sort of overlapping aphasia that compelled him to (a) tell excruciatingly long stories about his guns, (b) tell the same gun stories multiple times, and (c) ignore all social cues that someone did not want to hear his gun stories right now. I watched him follow people into the bathroom, still talking, when clearly they had only entered the bathroom in a futile attempt to escape him.

He had one story about gun-cleaning that I heard so much I can still remember it, since he told it to me and others in my presence repeatedly. The receptionist lady loathed him for non-racist reasons, and to subtly torture her I would encourage him to tell this story and even draw it out if possible. Here it is:

I got this nine millimeter Glock that’s been giving me problems. It’s great for shooting, love that gun, got it at a show in Mississippi for a great deal but it has a really rough action. I mean, really rough! I cleaned it and oiled and cleaned it and oiled it, I must have spent ten hours on that thing one weekend! And it would get better but after awhile it always got rough and scratchy when cycling rounds. But then you know what? I heard from my uncle a way to fix it. I packed that boy with smokers toothpaste! And then I dry fired it about a thousand times! Re-packed it and fired, over and over, a thousand times! I had to buy nine tubes of that toothpaste! The lady at the drugstore thought I was crazy! But you know what? Now it’s [cock fingers into pistol shape, make click sound as thumb goes down] smoooooth as silk. So smooth.

I can hear his voice in my head even now. Imagine that story highly embellished and recursing several ways, lasting far longer than it takes to read.

Much as I enjoyed the sadomasochistic experience of these gun stories, I didn’t like what often preceded or followed: an imaginary scenario where the guy defended his home, car, person, honor, or imaginary wife from a black assailant using one or several of his guns. Usually this would be inspired by a news story about a black person accused or convicted of a violent crime, and what would happen “if one of them ever tried that with me” and how he wasn’t afraid of any big [insert racial slur here]. There were many sad things about this guy’s insecurities, but while his love of guns made him the most dangerous, his attempts to use racism as vehicle for interpersonal connection were the most pathetic. At least to me.

Much later, when I was writing a story about migrant workers picking apples at orchards in northern Alabama, I was interviewing a farmer who was virulently, poisonously racist against black people. But he absolutely loved the Mexican and Central American migrants who worked his orchards. He ticked off all the reasons he hated hiring black people: lazy, criminal, undependable, loud, disrespectful, bad families, not churchgoing. Whereas he considered the migrant workers very reliable, uncomplaining, devoted to their families, obedient, quiet, often religious even if he didn’t much care for Catholics. I gently suggested one difference beyond their ethnicities was that the migrant workers were often undocumented, had few rights, and were very dependent on his goodwill. He readily agreed as if this was further proof of their superiority as a labor resource, and further pointed out that he had grown up around black people and knew them well, while the migrant population was relatively new to those parts. Who knows, he mused, maybe I’m just not used to their ways yet.