Movin’ On Up
The other day, I was in a meeting with a client’s outside auditors, controller and the company president/owner, and he was explaining the mechanics of the process whereby we import some raw materials from China. Part of this process requires us to wire payment in full before the supplier will ship the product.
A couple of raised eyebrows from the auditors prompted the president to grin and reply, “No tickee, no washee!” The response in the room was dead silence, when I’m sure he expected chuckles and eye-rolling.
We could have a lengthy discussion of the inappropriateness of racially-tinged jokes in the workplace (or anyplace else), whether it signals an intent to do harm or merely garner a moment’s frivolity or, in the context that all racism is harmful, whether we can countenance a range from the benign to the virulent. This guy runs the most humane business I’ve ever been around, and in my fantasy justice league I’ll just sentence him to sensitivity training this time. Ironically, the only Chinese employee here is a woman with a Phd in chemical engineering, with whom the president has a terrific professional relationship, one that he would be mortified to compromise by making a dumbass remark. But he is what he is and he said what he said.
My point is not to put him on trial so much as to reflect on the moments that followed. At first I thought the silence meant that people were taken aback at the remark’s crudeness and political incorrectness. The auditors and our controller were all in their 20s and 30s. But the reality was that, of the six of us, the president and I, both over 55, were the only people who had ever heard the pejorative. The others’ silence was entirely due to their bafflement at words that made no sense to them and they had no context for.
So, is this progress of a sort - the possibility that a negative racial stereotype has faded from the consciousness of younger generations? Most likely it’s mixed. On the one hand, racism regarding Chinese/Asians has certainly not disappeared. On the other, the subject matter of that racism has probably morphed from the condescension and ridicule of the epithet above to a more complicated, envy-based view of people who have a high acceptance rate at elite schools and who are becoming a formidable economic competitor and our country’s leading mortgage banker. Oh, wait - those are the reasons everybody’s hated the Jews all this time.
