That Time You Raised Racial Demographics at an All-Staff Meeting

Management at your new job holds an all-staff meeting to discuss office culture, and they ask everyone to write words on Post-its describing the culture anonymously.

So on one Post-it you write “homogeneous,” since the office is 100% white, and the surrounding small, regional city is not.

Everyone turns in their Post-its face-down, and Kimberly reads them one at a time, and your colleagues have written words like “fun” and “hardworking,” and she gets to yours and squints and says, “humongous?” and then Dwayne looks at it but also squints in confusion.

And there’s no way you’re going to draw attention to yourself — after six weeks on the job — by being the only one to describe the office as homogeneous, especially after your last job (your first real job in this valley) where Betsy — who once said that she could never vote for someone with the same genitalia as her own — sent texts about you to other co-workers, saying that she was sick of your bitchy gay shit.

Which stung because nobody in your entire life had ever described you as bitchy (though they’d sometimes described you as gay), and in a huff of indignation you went to HR, who launched an exhaustive investigation that led nowhere, and the weird thing is that when you look back on that job you feel guilty, which shouldn’t be right but is true, about going to HR, and now you think you never should have gone to HR, you should have just kept your mouth shut.

But now in the office culture meeting they’re trying to decipher your vocabulary and you think maybe Betsy was right, maybe you really are bitchy — after six weeks at a new job you’ve climb up on your perch of judgment to render verdict on organizational demographics.

“Homogenized?” asks Dwayne. Then he and Kimberly toss the Post-it aside and move on to the next one.

Because it hasn’t been that long since your own personal series of objective failures (divorce lawyers, zero balances, cheap whiskey) and you have the sinking feeling that yes, you’re the bitch, just pissed that you got yourself stuck in a valley where an entire company could be white and you could pass, on your morning commute, a deer who’d been hit by a truck, lying crumpled on the ground, and you’re still seeing the deer in the conference room with the Post-its cluttering the wall, the sides of its bloodied chest still rising and falling, gasping for breath, and you wish that as you’d driven past you’d looked the other way.

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