On an email with my manager I described a coworker I only worked with once as a small, thin woman that was either born in an East Asian country or has East Asian parents. I don’t know this person’s name. I don’t see a better way to describe her all things considered.
The managers answer: it is disrespectful to describe people according to ethnic background or physical appearance.
My next question for this manager: dear manager, how should I describe this person then?
I don’t know if I’m being genuinely disrespectful or this is a very thin skinned manager. Either way, I had to work with another coworker I didn’t know either. This conversation with manager B ensued:
manager B: ‘today you’re working with mike’
me: ‘who’s mike?’
manager B: ‘that fat guy’
make it make sense.
It’s not?
You’re just a fucking idiot.
You’re describing people based on stuff that’s dumb, it would be like me, to someone going “who’s the one who said that?” went “oh the one with a complete lack of common sense and no finesse at all”
You don’t describe people on race cause it’s like reducing them down to that is all they are. You don’t describe people on weight, cause it’s like reducing them down to that is all they are. And getting overly specific on race just comes across as both really weird and really presumptive.
You are best starting more exact and then widening the net if it didn’t work. “The girl with the brown hair, wears a baseball cap, speaks with a London accent, maybe Asian?”
And yet its how I see it used in Vancouver area by people of different ethnic backgrounds. Walk into Best Buy and ask for something specific, Sikh greeter says look for the brown guy near the iPads.