Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire I sufferd from racism

I got no Tiddes or hair so your two up on me.

The Good Lord knows that if I had Tiddes I'd never get out of my chair, he's seen fit to not encourage me.......

I didn't suffer from it, I did something about it.

We got a letter from the local government in 72', stating that my blond haired/blue eyed daughter in 1rst grade had been selected to be bused to a predominately black school.

And we could not fight it, it was the law.

We lived in Maryland.

We now live in Maine. We packed up and were gone within 90days and have never looked back. That was 45 yrs. ago.

Life in Maine could not be any whiter. [of course I mean the "snow"]

Good for you!

I'd do that, or something similar. I sure wouldn't have put up with that crap.

I was born white, thought it was gonna be alright.
Then I couldn’t get a job Jack, I needed to be black.
I had been to Fine schools, had all the right tools
Then I got f....ked in the ass, but I took it with class.
I started my own business said I, guess who need not apply?

Friend wrote that.

You're a racist for not acknowledging your white privilege.

I spent my life as a Toolmaker.

Blacks and females didn't impact my profession.

Lots of black drivers.

back in the nineties, we moved to Miami. I had owned restaurants and managed them for others. I had years of verifiable success in the field. I could not find a job in Miami in Food Service at any thing other than kitchen help. Reason? I did not speak Spanish.
Now you could not refuse to hire immigrants for not speaking English, but you evidently could discriminate against Americans for not speaking a foreign language.

In the Toolmaker trade, blacks rarely lasted past the loss of their first finger.

Unfortunately, they would generally trash $50,000 worth of machines and materials before they would finally get their thumb snatched off in a lathe.

"haaaaaaa-WOOOOOOOOoooooooo",...you'd hear em squall.

"What was that?", somebody would ask.

"Black guy runnin' the lathe", someone would answer.

"Oh", they'd say.

Back in the late 1980's I was in a similar situation as many of the above responders. I lived in a very rural area where race was not a big issue, but sex was. After being denied many interviews because I was a male, I went (at 40 yrs old) to nursing school. Graduated in '91 and was hired immediately, actually a semester before graduation. Male nurses are quite the minority.

I took the test to be accepted into the Operating Engineers Apprenticeship Program. 263 people took the test and 23 passed it. They kept 20 people for the class, me being one of them. It's a 4 year apprenticeship including classroom time, hands on training on a variety of heavy equipment including 2 week intensive field sessions in the summer, and we were supposed to get 1000 hours of work as an oiler during the 4 year apprenticeship. We had one black guy and a Hispanic girl in our class. The Hispanic girl worked every day for the first two years. At that time, any road work in Ohio required minorities as a condition of winning the bids. She counted as two minorities-female and Hispanic, so she worked non stop. None of the white guys got any work in the first two years, but she worked every day. There were white guys two years ahead of us in their 4th year that hadn't been out on a job yet. I gave up on it after the 2nd year, as field sessions came up, and my employer wouldn't let me have time off for them. I couldn't afford to lose that job, and was fed up with the whole minority thing. Yeah, I think I definitely suffered from racism.

Somebody should have volunteered to knock her up,.....have the Union pay the child support.

Most women are more than happy to be fugged out of the work force.

Knock 'em up,...they'll go home and cook pablum,....but somebody has to pay.

Take up a collection.

And they learned that chit will be given to them.

Navy did it too. We were told to hire a black man. Ended up with a more qualified white man being passed over 3 times, due to a melanin deficiency...we were then told to hire a black woman, but had no applicants even remotely qualified.

I had a buddy that was working his way up in Cincinnati in the 80's and hit the white ceiling. He was a vet as well. He and a few other talented firefighters had to file a federal suit to get their next promotions. He finally just made Captain in the early 90's just before the Cancer got him.

When I grow up I plan to be a black woman veteran who is partly handicapped so I can gets me a good job.

Actually, most of what's described here, and what happened to me and thousands of others at my company, is Reverse Discrimination through Affirmative Action. My company, in order to avoid lengthy legal troubles, signed off on a Consent Decree which obligated them to hire and promote women and minorities in preference to us white fellers, to balance out the discrimination they had practiced before (which was true, in part anyway). This left many better-qualified and able people behind while putting a lot of poor candidates in jobs they couldn't handle, because the primary qualifications became race and/or sex, not ability. It's impossible to calculate the cost to the company of having to hire extra people to do the work the AA folks couldn't handle, but clearly they thought it was less than the expense of a bunch of lawsuits and bad publicity. What it cost me and others was being stuck in lower-paying jobs until the quotas were filled and the workforce balanced to the government's satisfaction.

Some of the AA people went on to become valuable, capable employees while others were drags on the whole shebang for their entire careers and often attitude cases to boot because they knew they were pretty much bullet-proof., but the company got by, and those of us that were held back eventually caught up to where we belonged. My second-level manager promoted a bunch of us in one fell swoop to make up for what we'd been denied, and I imagine others did as well. I never resented the AA people myself (unless I had trouble because they couldn't do their job, even after years of experience), but I was pissed at the company for putting us in this situation in the first place by discriminating and then rolling over rather than seeking a fair settlement for what they'd done, costing good employees thousands each in missed higher wages and opportunities.

Still, I came out smelling like a rose in the end. One of Life's little lessons.

All of what has been posted here is very, very, true. I estimate that affirmative action cost me in the neighborhood of a million $$ over my career. My advice to young white males has been to avoid any career or job that is particularly subject to affirmative action, such as administration, academia, or any form of public service. Less vulnerable are fields such as engineering or skilled trades. See Bristoe's post.

Paul

I have worked my whole life in the oilfield and affirmative action forced the companies I worked for to hire, promote, and retain some people that were worthless. They were dead weight for the rest of the crew to carry. Any minorities that were even half way decent hands were fast tracked for promotions. Government trying to make things fair ended up being another failure.