I completely sympathize with Black America. I want to go visit Barack Obama’s church in Chicago, and tell Reverend Wright that I do not take his rant against White America personally.
Where I work, the only woman in a room full of engineers and technical writers (I’m a technical writer myself), I deal with bigotry every day. Or almost every day. I don’t claim that my hurdles are as high as they would be if I were a black women. Not even. But I know the times are there, those times, for instance, when my opinion is completely dismissed because of my sex. And there is one black engineer here (I overheard some controversy around hiring him; a quote: "Once you hire one it's hard to get rid of him.") And not a single woman engineer.
Recently we hired a little batch of contract technical writers (all men). Apparently, our company doesn’t feel it’s necessary to give contractors the sexual harassment speech permanent employees get when they come in, so these contractors come waltzing in often thinking -- I swear to God ‘cause I’ve heard some of them say it – that as contractors they’re not liable under the same laws as perm people.
Anyway, so we get this batch of contract writers. Second day, here comes an email from one of them asking me out. Full of “compliments.” I forward it on to my boss, then to the next boss. I still don’t know if anyone actually talked to him, but he stopped it. Subsequently though he goes right ahead and offhandedly dismisses 85% of what I say. Just today I tried to save him so grief with the boss by attempting to show him how to do something correctly, but no dice. And this is not unusual. Generally, those men who have worked with me for a while (like more than a year) behave as if I might accidentally know something.
Aviation is a conservative field. I’m surrounded by rapid anti-tax, anti-feminist, pro-war, pick-up truck driving good ole boys with engineering degrees. Sure, there’s an occasional exception. And some that are quite nice in spite of their wishes for extinction upon everyone unlike themselves. But I have to tell you that this is a hard time to work in such an environment, and I am working hard to keep the heart above water, here. Especially since the company itself is floundering under poor management, there is no union here at all (to work as an engineer at Boeing one has to join the engineers’ union), everyone complains about how shitty the company treats them but God forbid anyone says the word “union” – you might as well say, “Call Karl Marx!” But they bitch constantly about poor management, poor treatment by management (they’re right – our upper management treats even us highly skilled, highly educated workers like share croppers); we’ve lost nearly all our tribal corporate knowledge due to defection of 90% of the high-level engineering and planning staff. It just goes on and on.
And yes, these are people who think Hillary Clinton is a socialist. For the love of God. She is about as deep into Washington lobbyist hell as it’s possible to get. No one gets bigger donations from the medical industry!
I don’t know. I’m feeling depresses. My beloved fiancé is now expressing severe hesitation about moving to my beloved city, and the thought of leaving my new-found home neighborhood make me want to curl up in a ball and expire. Add to that the first woman presidential candidate in history playing a kind of racial hardball that wouldn’t have given Jackie Robinson even a spot on the bench, and the daily grind of general and political negativity and intolerance I am almost literally forced to live with at work (they’re still holding us here under mandatory overtime), and, well, I don’t know. I have a constant feeling of sadness these days, little motivation to move. Some of this is due to the lack of free time I have – that mandatory overtime. I’m tired. There’s not that much to life when all you do is work and go home and sleep.
Hillary, please stop it. Please. It’s not that important, you being President. Can’t you just let something good happen here? Can’t you just let the next generation have some hope, for fuck’s sake? I mean, have a campaign, but please, get on the wave of the new paradigm. Let’s you and I step out of the way and let our kids have it. Or let’s have you and Barack join up and break down all the boundaries – but don’t take this moment away from out kids. This is the very moment at which we either shift to something new, or fall back in exhausted disgust. Which will it be, girls and boys?
Where I work, the only woman in a room full of engineers and technical writers (I’m a technical writer myself), I deal with bigotry every day. Or almost every day. I don’t claim that my hurdles are as high as they would be if I were a black women. Not even. But I know the times are there, those times, for instance, when my opinion is completely dismissed because of my sex. And there is one black engineer here (I overheard some controversy around hiring him; a quote: "Once you hire one it's hard to get rid of him.") And not a single woman engineer.
Recently we hired a little batch of contract technical writers (all men). Apparently, our company doesn’t feel it’s necessary to give contractors the sexual harassment speech permanent employees get when they come in, so these contractors come waltzing in often thinking -- I swear to God ‘cause I’ve heard some of them say it – that as contractors they’re not liable under the same laws as perm people.
Anyway, so we get this batch of contract writers. Second day, here comes an email from one of them asking me out. Full of “compliments.” I forward it on to my boss, then to the next boss. I still don’t know if anyone actually talked to him, but he stopped it. Subsequently though he goes right ahead and offhandedly dismisses 85% of what I say. Just today I tried to save him so grief with the boss by attempting to show him how to do something correctly, but no dice. And this is not unusual. Generally, those men who have worked with me for a while (like more than a year) behave as if I might accidentally know something.
Aviation is a conservative field. I’m surrounded by rapid anti-tax, anti-feminist, pro-war, pick-up truck driving good ole boys with engineering degrees. Sure, there’s an occasional exception. And some that are quite nice in spite of their wishes for extinction upon everyone unlike themselves. But I have to tell you that this is a hard time to work in such an environment, and I am working hard to keep the heart above water, here. Especially since the company itself is floundering under poor management, there is no union here at all (to work as an engineer at Boeing one has to join the engineers’ union), everyone complains about how shitty the company treats them but God forbid anyone says the word “union” – you might as well say, “Call Karl Marx!” But they bitch constantly about poor management, poor treatment by management (they’re right – our upper management treats even us highly skilled, highly educated workers like share croppers); we’ve lost nearly all our tribal corporate knowledge due to defection of 90% of the high-level engineering and planning staff. It just goes on and on.
And yes, these are people who think Hillary Clinton is a socialist. For the love of God. She is about as deep into Washington lobbyist hell as it’s possible to get. No one gets bigger donations from the medical industry!
I don’t know. I’m feeling depresses. My beloved fiancé is now expressing severe hesitation about moving to my beloved city, and the thought of leaving my new-found home neighborhood make me want to curl up in a ball and expire. Add to that the first woman presidential candidate in history playing a kind of racial hardball that wouldn’t have given Jackie Robinson even a spot on the bench, and the daily grind of general and political negativity and intolerance I am almost literally forced to live with at work (they’re still holding us here under mandatory overtime), and, well, I don’t know. I have a constant feeling of sadness these days, little motivation to move. Some of this is due to the lack of free time I have – that mandatory overtime. I’m tired. There’s not that much to life when all you do is work and go home and sleep.
Hillary, please stop it. Please. It’s not that important, you being President. Can’t you just let something good happen here? Can’t you just let the next generation have some hope, for fuck’s sake? I mean, have a campaign, but please, get on the wave of the new paradigm. Let’s you and I step out of the way and let our kids have it. Or let’s have you and Barack join up and break down all the boundaries – but don’t take this moment away from out kids. This is the very moment at which we either shift to something new, or fall back in exhausted disgust. Which will it be, girls and boys?
