The Willful Ignorance of Most White Administrators Krystal Kavita Jagoo
“I always tell my staff that we will never be a slave to precedent,” said this white administrator, as if he was overwhelmingly vulnerable to being enslaved on this university campus in 2018. Did he imagine those who had been violently stolen from their lands and enslaved by his kind had remotely any choice in the matter? Given that I sat in mandatory training, during the probationary period for my permanent full-time unionized university job, I knew better than to interrupt him mid-sentence, despite my yearning to do so, as that would have prompted doubts about my fit for the institution. Instead, I noted internally that I would discuss the matter following probation, and pulled out my cellphone in an attempt to avoid confronting this man.
I would later read a mass email from another white administrator who discouraged cell phone use during training presentations that I knew was directed at me, as he had entered the room shortly after I began to rely on my cellphone to desperately avoid security escorting me off campus for revealing I was not a model minority. I would discuss this with him after passing probation, and he would assure me that I could have also talked to him about this before that time, as he propagated that feedback was welcome in his department, on a campus that I had come to think of as Jordan Peterson’s stomping grounds. I would soon question this when we were assigned an article with 24 N-words to read before another mandatory training with a different problematic white administrator, which prompted my 1000+ words email in a desperate attempt to disrupt anti-Blackness in this equity office. I am often told that these are the nice white folx but in my decade-long career, what I have mostly seen is how they present their queerness and Judaism in an impressive performance that only serves their own wants and whims while causing untold trauma to the most oppressed whose humanity somehow continues to evade them.
As if I needed the first meta-analysis comparing the relationship among racism, sexism, and ageism to tell me, it suggests that “whiteness is more central to the ideal worker prototype as compared with maleness.” This research demonstrates how BIPOC women are disproportionately policed in the workplace through the primary lens of white supremacy, conceivably alongside other negative biases. In Social Work, which tends to be dominated by women, the glass elevator is worth noting, whereby white men are disproportionately promoted. In this way, it is easy to see how the glass elevator contributes to the skewed perceptions of work performance that BIPOC women face, as our very existence is incongruent with the “ideal worker prototype,” even before this social worker, keen on anti-oppressive