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?
Your job might have keyed it that way to meet diversity quotas. Don’t rock the boat unless someone else brings it up first.
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 happens enough for me to have noticed it a few times. It probably helps if you work with Americans in Australia.
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.
I’ve always hated reddit hosted videos, the performance was terrible.
Aren’t you kind of appropriating Indigenous Australians? I mean they’re not “your” native people, right?
Native Australians are not native people of Australia?
Yes they’re native to that land, but they’re not Zik’s Indigenous Australians! That’s what I meant about appropriating them, the way they wrote that was just too ironic.
He was using “we” to refer to his country, obviously
Right, and therefore appropriating the natives, whose land he is on. That is the irony. I’m in the US, and they’re not our Native Americans. That’s just not something you can say.
Shit Americans say, lmao
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.
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.
When I was in similar situations I’d point out similaities to them. So e.g. if spaniards are latinos because they speak spanish, then people from the UK are all Americans because they speak English.
Dependent on the level of education, you might have to flip them both (“US people are all english”) because they might actually believe that English people are US-emmigrants.
There are definitely white Latinos in the US, it’s a race vs. ethnicity thing. But definitely no Latinos from Europe!! 🤣
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.
people here often don’t get the difference because they forget Spain exists.
Except when they call all Latin Americans “Spanish” 🤦♂️
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
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.
If they came to power again but with access to people’s 23andMe or Ancestry results, things would get really scary very fast. Most white people I know who took it aren’t actually 100% white, including myself. I’m a little bit black. It’s just not enough that I would justify changing what I’m listed as on documents.
I’d keep it. Workplaces have been brazen about promoting and hiring and firing on the basis of race lately. This should give you a significant advantage. It’s unfortunate that the law allowed companies to racially discriminate, but here we are.
It wasn’t done intentionally on your part. Why draw attention to yourself? Just forget about it.
Besides, if your employer did do it on purpose, it won’t help to let them know that you know. They’ll just fix it, remember that you’re a potential troublemaker, and mess with someone else’s record instead. I see no upside for you.
what difference does it make now? 99% of white americans claim native american ancestry as if we fucked these people into extinction. everyone i know is related to a cherokee or blackfoot princess through their great great great grandparent…i even heard the same story in my family. once i got my dna test results that said “0% native american” i started to wonder exactly how many indian “princesses” there are. if you change it, best case scenario everything stays the same and worst case scenario you get fired for lying on your application. doesnt seem like a good move to rock the boat.
Maybe they’re fudging their diversity numbers
Are you a female Senator from MA?
