The Real Racists.

I started this blog to talk about some of the things I can't talk about at work. So, here's one of them. Racism. A colleague of mine was just 're-organized'. Now, never mind how 1984 that sounds, I'll relay to you a conversation that I had with her just after this happened. Her supervisor, a cold witch of a woman, was talking to this woman about her young son and the preschool she was planning to send him to. She told my (now former) colleague how it was important to get into the right preschool and that education is very important in my family. I told "K", that it sounded to me like what she was saying was that education is very important in my white family, but you are black, so obviously, education is not very important to you. "K" said to me-you said it, not me. I'm glad I said it, because I think that's really what the supervisor meant. She has other minority women in her department and treats them like complete crap. The thing is, the supervisor considers herself a beacon of progressive thinking, supports gay marriage and all the 'correct' causes. But when it comes down to it, how enlightened is she really? The point of this post is to ask if any of you have had experiences of what I would characterize as 'inverse' racism? What I mean is, have you witnessed or been subject to truly racist sentiments by the people who are supposed to be the most liberal and enlightened of us all? Another colleague once joked to me that she is concerned about her parents taking her young son out on outings because her father has bad vision and her mother has a physical disability. She said 'we joke that it's the blind leading the disabled'. I almost lost my breath. This woman is a militant lesbian who took a lot of pleasure in trying to shock me with a reveal of her sexual orientation-she didn't get the shock she was looking for, but that's a whole other story. Hypocrites really make me sick.