My job incorrectly thinks I'm Native American, should I tell them?
My job incorrectly thinks I'm Native American, should I tell them?
I don't want to dox myself, but I've been at my job for 5+ years. I guess either my boss or I fat fingered something while I was on boarding, cuz just now I was going over some paperwork and.. As far as my job is concerned I'm Native American. I am very much white. Nobody ever brought it up.
I couldn't find an easy way to change it and I'd rather not talk to HR if it's not a big deal. So, forget about it? Call HR?
I know this is very common in the US but as an European this is still a weird concept for me to keep track of a person's ethnicity at all.
Does this have any implications whatsoever in terms of benefits or something? Otherwise I'd just let it be.
I'm Australian and the one that really gets me is when Americans refer to indigenous Australians as "African American" because of their skin colour. They're in no way from Africa or America, but nice job appropriating our native people.
How often do Americans refer to aboriginals as African Americans? This is not a common situation.
It's like people overcorrecting and using "whom" when "who" really would be correct. Ditto "you and I" vs "you and me". People get corrected enough times to be embarrassed, but still don't have any interest in correct usage, so they just blanket apply what they think is the rule rather than trying to actually learn any of its nuances. It's not a perfect analogy, but I can imagine people just reverting to "African-American" as a no-thought safe bet when referring to brown people.
Aren't you kind of appropriating Indigenous Australians? I mean they're not "your" native people, right?
Spaniard here. I did some remote work with a North American company and in my profile my race was "Latino". I tried to explain I'm caucasian but it was futile.
I had that exact conversation at work a few days ago. Someone was insisting that Spaniards are Latino, so I asked them if Spain is in Latin America or Europe. That was the key to them eventually figuring it out.
I'm American, and of Spanish descent. On all my paperwork it says Latino, people here often don't get the difference because they forget Spain exists.
They were wrong. Spaniards are definitely not considered Latino here.
I’m mostly Sicilian and Irish but my great grandmother on my mom’s side is Spanish. People usually don’t know where I’m from so just settle on thinking I’m Jewish, but I had people think I was Latino more recently. I’m more used to it happening to my mom because she’s a lot more tan than I am.
There are definitely white Latinos in the US, it's a race vs. ethnicity thing. But definitely no Latinos from Europe!! 🤣
I believe it’s a legal thing where HR has to track the ethnicity (if applicant discloses) due to equal employment. Basically the US federal government wants to know if a company is discriminating against a protected class during hiring and employment
My company in the UK insisted that I fill in a diversity profile covering a lot of what is generally considered highly sensitive information. Well the only mandatory field was the date completed... so that is all they got.
Fortunately, people of non-European ancestry are treated fairly in Europe, so there is no need to keep tabs if they are being the subject of job loss more often. In the US, people of color and particularly migrants can be discriminated against, instead of welcomed with open arms like they are in Greece, Italy, and France. If there were discrimination in Europe, you could end up with concentrations of ethnic groups in the suburbs of cities like Paris. The people there might protest or riot after perceived injustices, and we wouldn't want that.
Keeping track of race is entirely optional.
You’re 100% free to decline including it on any personnel file or application (with the exception of acting/modeling). It’s also self-identifying.
Consider that as a multi-racial pluralistic society - our values will be different than a European country whose major ethnic groups are the indigenous people.
We have an unfortunately long legacy of systematic racism issues. Communities or color experience slower emergency response times, fewer school resources and teacher pay, redlining and gerrymandered districting, food deserts, fewer public transportation options, and often fewer per capita polling stations on Election Day.
Until race stops being an observable factor for community outcomes, we still have a lot of work to do.
Many organizations see and understand this. As part of their sense of corporate social responsibility, companies make a good faith effort to hire from a ethnically diverse pool of candidates. If all your candidates are white - a company needs to ask itself if that’s a reflection of their own hiring biases or if that’s a systemic issue within the talent pool? It’s good to know these things - because industry surveys are constant - which help local leaders, non-profit organizations, colleges and universities, and governments do their jobs.
Meeting diversity goals is good for a variety of reasons. Importantly in capitalism, it’s good to investors because customers tend to prefer supporting diverse companies. Perhaps more importantly than that, different backgrounds offer different modes of thinking when it comes to problem solving. Crowd sourcing from a bigger idea pool is good for productivity.
Over here (Austria) asking about race or processing this information in regards to a job wil land the employer in hot water really quickly, since it opens them up to racism claims.
Europe has a different history with heritage and bloodlines of indigenous people so it makes sense it’s not as big of a conversation there.
In Aus, we’re a settlement too, therefore conversations of heritage matter a great deal. Speaking in practical terms, there can be potential benefits to identifying as indigenous in the form of welfare due to the disadvantages indigenous people face.
An extra reason (or even the main one) is that we have a bad history when it comes to racial registration. The countries that suffered the worst during the Holocaust were the ones that had a registry of the Jewish population that the Nazis could just look into when they took over.
The downside is that it's much harder to identify racial profiling at work for example. It's also basically impossible to see if violence on POC is more prevelant.
I'm Australian and the one that really gets me is when Americans refer to indigenous Australians as "African American" because of their skin colour. They're in no way from Africa or America, but nice job appropriating our native people.