I suffered from racism and when I tell the story it pisses black people off.

After I got out of the Navy in 1982 I wanted to be a fireman. It was a part of my Navy rate (HT) so I knew what was involved.

I applied to several cities and tested in 5. Cleveland, Toledo, Columbus, Cincinnati and Pittsburgh. I tested at the very top of the heap and with my veterans points should have been a shoe in. I was told by all these cities that I tested in the top five. Some of them retested and I did those too.

I was not hired due to affirmative action, and they had no problem telling me they were looking for blacks and Hispanics. That is racism pure and simple.

I investigated being a Texas Game Warden in the 80's.

Was told that they pick candidates from large population districts (like Houston) and then be a minority (preferably Hispanic).

Nothing like being fair to everyone, right?

Yeah, but, yeah but, it's only racism one direction. Duh.

While in college, I worked during the summers for the USDA Statistical Reporting Svc in Boise. They needed to hire a secretary and the higher ups decided they needed what would amount to a token black on the staff. So, they imported a young black woman from Salt Lake. What a waste of a good chair. She did nothing but manicure her nails. She was incapable of even the most mundane stuff like filing.

I’ve been the victim of institutionalized racism many times, most times it centered around civil service tests.

Back when I was applying for college my buddy (a black guy...gasp) and I both applied to WWU I had a 3.4gpa and he had a 2.0gpa. I scored higher on the SAT’s and was captain of the swim team. He got a full ride...tuition, room, board and books and I got denied. My parents always told me that the world isn’t fair so I didn’t dwell on it. I went to community college and then transferred to the U of W.

My best friend started with the USPS in Baltimore. He was hired along with several other whites to make the quota. True story!!!
The gold ring for federal hiring is an Asian woman. Extra points!!!

When I was a rural mail carrier at USPS, they hired substitutes for my route. The first 2 were white guys, and neither worked out. The last 4 were 3 Black women and a Puerto Rican guy. One of the Black girls, and the Hispanic dude went on to become full time. Both are good mail carriers. The 2 Black women that didn't make were pathetic.

They never did get around to hiring me an Asian gal.

It generally creates a toxic work environment when employees aren't chosen for their abilities. One can count their blessings if they are in a field where their career trajectory matches their abilities.

Guy I used to work with got his first job because of race. His first name is Lincoln. He was hired out of college at one of the aerospace firms in So. Cal. They were quite taken a back when he showed up the first day and they found he wasn't what they presumed he was.

But he didn't misrepresent himself, and they couldn't admit that they were trying to hire on race. So he kept the job.

In about 1980 I tested for the Post Office, got high-ranking scores, put in for an interview, was told not to bother unless I was a minority female.

That's happened in all levels of various civil service types of jobs................& look at what the service levels have deteriorated to in the majority of them.

MM

Harvard University is being sued for discrimination against Asians. It seems that Asian students must have 450 point higher scores than blacks, or so it is alleged, on the average.

My brother in law applied for police, fire dept., and usps when he got back from 'Nam in '69. Tested well but never hired as he is white.
My nephew tried for several years to get on as a full time fire fighter in NJ....but was told they had to hire blacks or hispanics.....
if I remember correctly it took him almost 7 years to finally get hired. This after being a Captain in the volunteer unpaid
f/d in the small town he lived in.....
Racism is wrong....preferential hiring which depends on color is wrong....lost several jobs in '70's because I am white. In one case that I know of many people died because they hired a black for a job.....

The good news is, now we can "identify" as whatever we want.

Next job I apply for I'm gonna identify as a Black lesbian blind in one eye and walks with a limp.





P

nope- the triple threat is a black lesbian female and boy are they quick to file frivolous eeo lawsuits when they dont get what they want.
Nightmare to have to work with them.

The story is very common. I had the same thing happen to me soon after high school, except it was for the local PD, not the fire department, but it happens equally in both.

I studied my butt off and scored at the very top on the test. I was told that, due to my test score, I would be among the first to move to the next stage toward hiring, and was given a date and location for showing up for the physical. Then the courts stepped in and determined that because no blacks scored high enough on the test (based strictly on memorization of a book they sent us in advance) to be immediately advanced to the next step towards hiring, the test was deemed racist and all the scores were to be randomly jumbled starting at a very low score cut-off, arbitrarily chosen by the courts so as to include lots of blacks. The jumble put me at the bottom when I had been at the very top, i.e., a black man got the top spot I had earned with my test score and I was given the low spot he had earned with his test score.

I guess I had to do my part in paying the price for having enslaved black folks long before I was even born.

I'm surprised that this sort of thing wasn't declared unconstitutional from the start. Our courts have essentially abandoned American legal principles.

When I was in math grad school a young woman from an HBCU was admitted to the program. The graduate adviser placed her in courses appropriate to what her transcript indicated. We took her into our study groups and it wasn't long at all before it became clear she was not sufficiently prepared. As an attempt to salvage the situation the graduate adviser moved her into a slate of courses a tier down from where she started out. I don't recall if she stayed through the full year after that.

This kind of thing screws two people over, the one who got in and the one who should have gotten in.

Exactly.

I should have changed my name right out of high school to Trovon Jackson.

Looks like a bunch of us have experienced our share of white privilege.

Yup, Yup And, Yup! I was told I was Too Perfect! late 70s & 80s 6" 205lbs Blue eyes and Blond! enough said!

Then you REALLY needed to be punished for slavery.

Air Traffic Division of the FAA has been hiring controllers like that for some time. Give that a long thought next time you board a jet to somewhere.

Lost out on several fisheries biologist jobs in the 1990s because I was a white male. Yep, that white privilege really worked to my advantage.

what was it Rambo said ?
" . . . I was in charge of million-dollar equipment- now I can't even get a job parking cars! ! !"

how little I realized how prophetic that was. . . .
I've worked at new car dealers since I was a teenager. Nowdays if you no speakee, you no
can getee a yob regardless of how many decades of experience and training or ability

Early 80's, I'm trying to get a job at Shell. Field job, needed to be able to use tools and do easy technical stuff. I was recently out of the Marines, spent my hitch fixing radars in F-4's. All they wanted were women. They were willing to teach them what a screwdriver is. Most of the women didn't work out. It is cold and nasty at times in northern Michigan. I'd have loved it.

When will you goofy azzed white fuggers figure it out? It's impossible to be racist to a white person.......At least thats what they say on the "Black Only" sites.

If'n ya have big tiddies Jorge will hire you for something..........

Do man titties count? I think these days they might.

Armednfree: There was a lesson that I hope you learned way back then.
And that lesson is/was - "be careful, BE VERY CAREFUL, who you vote for"!
Politicians, and judges who were appointed by politicians, CREATED that racism that you (and I!) were victimized by!
I figure that racism in the form of "affirmative action" over the course of my lifetime has cost me way more than half a million dollars, to date!
And the continuing theft that I have suffered will be going on til I die - which I hope to stave off for another 10 or 12 years and during that time I will suffer another $100,000.00 to 120,000.00 in personal losses.
Again be careful, very careful, who you vote for.
Hold into the wind
VarmintGuy

I can't make that call..........That's up to Jorge and he's tough. Maybe you should PM him a couple of close up picks..........

You're not alone gentlemen. It's the same in all democratic western, white majority nations these days. I hold the PC loving white Liberals responsible.

Yeah, that ought to make his day!

Don't forget he likes big asses too.

.........and again the VarmitGuy condenses a very personal procession of events that many of us have experienced in a condensed version!

Thanks VarmitGuy! But, me being me, I'm not so pissed off because the rest of the world is so screwed up; I still feel as though I came out ahead!

by the way, I've voted for Goldwater.

WTF? Are you saying A&F has a big ass? Dude! He's gonna cry now.

ROFL! reminds me of a co-worker of mine, she said she was hired as a rigger in the shipyard. 6 months later, they fired her because she did not know there was more than one type of wrench! yeah,,, OK...

I don't know what he's got, don't want to know either.

No, actually I never had an ass. Man titties and a big gut in my old age and a big head (8-3/8).


But I got all my hair and then some.

On the other hand, I got a job at an automotive shop in Huntsville, Ala., in 1970, because the shop foreman "didn't want another [bleep]". I didn't complain though, I needed the money. Guy I worked with was a dead ringer for Charlie Pride and was a damn good mechanic. Fast, smart, and hard working. I would have thought the foreman would have wanted another just like him. I like to think I was his equal so maybe he got one, just a different shade. I've always felt just a bit ashamed of the circumstances. GD

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.

How many times were you told "two wrongs don't make a right" when you were a child?

I was a general manager at a Chevrolet dealer in the 90's, trying hard to get my own store via dealer development with GM. I was told point blank to stop applying that only minorities were being accepted.....

Years ago I was an office manager for a nation wide trucking company. We needed to hire a driver. A Mexican came in to apply, or rather he sat in the car and sent his wife in. The boss told her to go get him. When he came in, we could see in an instant that this wasn't anyone we needed in one of our trucks. It wasn't racist at all. If he'd been a good man he might have got hired but he wasn't. We didn't have a minority on the crew and the boss knew that if this guy filled out an application there was a good chance that we'd own him. The trick was to keep him from officially applying.
The boss was a quick thinker. "One of the requirements of the job is to back a set of triples. Can you do that?"
"No, I can no back triples."
"Sorry, but you don't appear to be qualified for this job."

He left and we celebrated. Of course nobody can back a set of triples more than 3' and then only on a very flat lot with the trailers in a perfectly straight line.

Doesn't apply to the government, dontcha know?😜

Like I said, a life lesson.

Everybody should just start checking the "black" box on the application forms. I mean, what are they gonna do. Would pretty much end the bullshit.

These days you can "identify" as whatever you want.

Somewhat same time frame and same results. I needed some kind of preference points that a white male that was reliable, quick learning and hard working, counted as zero( hell basically negative)

No biggy though. I"ve never made a post about it. Its life. While I despise a lot of things including where I"ve worked the last 15 years and how they screwed me on my retirement so far, its what it is and make the most of it and move forward.