by Amber Ruffin
Coworker Quotes: Not Things I Heard, Things White People Said Directly to Lacey’s Beautiful Face
“Omaha has some really racist gangs.”
In a meeting someone said, “A lot of the time when you take braids down, you’ll find roaches in them.” I was wearing braids in this meeting.
“Well, I was fired by a woman who didn’t pay me enough and always hired—umm…a certain ethnic group.” I’m the only Black person in the room.
“Inner-city kids shouldn’t get fireworks! Their parents should spend their money on paying their bills and feeding their kids.”
“Lacey, I started watching a show on Netflix about a Black kid playing basketball on a scholarship. I’m just trying to learn about you.” “Well, I’m five-two and high maintenance so I don’t think it’s me you’re learning about.”
“We had a Black coach at school. He had a bald, lumpy, black head so we called him Milk Dud and he didn’t like it.”
“I was gonna vote for Obama but then I found out he was gonna paint the White House purple, so I didn’t.”
“There has to be something in the Asian DNA to make them look and become so smart.”
“Muslims burned down Notre Dame. It has to be.”
“Oh! I didn’t know your sister Amber wasn’t gay. She just reads gay. I mean, I should know.” This was said by the lady at work who has to tell you she’s gay every half hour in the hopes that she can say inappropriate Black stuff, but that’s not how it works.
“Just because I only have vanilla cupcakes doesn’t mean I’m racist. Hey, I liked chocolate back in the day; I used to swing in the jungle.” This was also said by the lady at work who has to tell you she’s gay every half hour in the hopes that she can say inappropriate Black stuff, but that’s not how it works.
“Make sure you vote tomorrow so we can keep Trump in office!”
“I’m Native American and it was the Mexicans who put Native Americans in concentration camps. Not white people.” A confused white person.
“There’s a horde of MS-13 gang members on their way here to kill us.”
Me: My African dance troupe is performing this weekend. So come out if you want to have fun!
Anne Marie: Oh! I don’t know if I would like that.
Me: Why not?
Anne Marie: Because don’t you guys perform naked with tambourines?
Sally, the Coworker with the Loudest, Dumbest Beliefs
These are all stories about Lacey’s coworker Sally. Now, Sally wasn’t the most racist coworker, or the loudest coworker. But what she was was a perfect mix of the two that guaranteed daily unease. As you read these stories, please imagine, like, a “no-nonsense” mother of five with chunky highlights and lowlights in her Long Island Medium haircut. She’s the type of woman who wears shorts when it is cold. She’s the type of woman who will keep your conversation going no matter what room she has wandered off to. Not the kind of woman who will send her meal back at a restaurant, but the kind of woman who will have fun with your kid when you bring them in to the office. The type of woman who will announce loudly to the room when you come in in a new shirt. When music plays, she sings along at full volume. If you feel sad, you can talk to her and she will be eager to try to provide some comfort and bring you a cupcake later. I give this long description just as a reminder that very racist people aren’t always easy to spot. So here are things that a lady who most people would describe as a “delight” said:
Lacey went to lunch with Sally and another white coworker. As they’re driving through the parking lot in a strip mall connected to a grocery store, Sally sees a Black woman pushing a cart of groceries. Just a regular woman pushing a cart of groceries to her car. Sally sees this and says, “Oh god, it must be the first of the month.” That was her reaction to a Black woman trying to shop.
“We need to stop hiring Black people. The ones we have are just ghetto, ghetto, ghetto! Lacey, I’m not talking to you. I like ya!”
Sally could not stand the Amish, Mormons, or minorities.
“The Amish are destroying this country. They rape the land.” This woman said the land is being raped. “They get land from the government that they don’t deserve and then they rape it.” What in the world could she mean by that? Does she mean they “start farms and work the land”? Does she think “work” means “rape”?
Sally’s friend Kate would chime in on her racist comments and say, “The time is coming soon where we will just have to build a commune and I will be the first one to defend it. I’ll be the one standing there with a rifle. I won’t ask questions. If you step on my property, I WILL SHOOT.” These two women were supervisors.
Think about being a nineteen-year-old Black CNA. You had to listen to comments like these all the time. You cannot make these comments and have a job in America. If you’re reading this and you or someone you know makes comments like these at work or anywhere, please contact the Sally and Kate commune. They have a lot of room and no real plan. Read more about it at www.unpopularcommune.com.
The No-Nos
Here’s a few unlikable stories. I call them the No-Nos because as Lacey was telling me each of these, I was holding my head in my hands, peeking through, saying, “No, no, no, no, no.”
Asian Mom
Lacey is talking about this very book with a lady she met at a party. The lady has two Asian sons who are adopted. Lacey said, “I’m sure you deal with these kinds of ignorant comments all the time, because people say all kinds of things about Asians. In fact, do you know what a coworker of mine once had the nerve to say to me about Asians? She said, ‘You can’t tell ’em apart; there’s no way to know if they’re male or female.’ Isn’t that insane? How could someone ever come to that conclusion?” This woman’s reply was unbelievable, so, to make it easier for you to digest, I’ve taken what she said sentence by sentence and marked each one with a corresponding number of racist-ness so that you can make sure to know how Lacey is feeling as her reply hits her ears. A 1 is “not racist” and a 10 is “very racist.” Ready? Okay. This white mother of two Asian kids said:
“Well, actually, Asians do look alike.” Now, what she’s saying here is that the thing Lacey explained to her is racist, is in fact not. I’ma go ahead and call that a 10 right out the gate.
“Different ethnic groups look alike. Like Chinese and Japanese people look like one another, then Vietnamese and Thai people look just alike.” Interesting move. So, at this point, she could have backpedaled and said, “I mean people who are from the same country look alike.” But she didn’t. She said the opposite of that. She basically said that not only do Asians look alike, here’s proof that I’ve spent time thinking about it. I would call this also a 10.
“Sometimes it’s hard to tell them apart with their slanty eyes.” (You guessed it—she pulled back the corners of her eyes to demonstrate.) “It’s even hard to tell if an Asian person is male or female because Asian men wear lots of pinks and pastels. And that’s confusing for a lot of Americans.” I know that last quote took some twists and turns, but each individual word of that sentence is a 45.
Normally, Lacey would walk away from such insanity, but this woman has Asian children she’s saying god knows what to. When Lacey tries to explain that no one can look at a white person and go, “You’re from Finland. I can see that,” why do they expect to do the same with Asian people? What is that? If you can’t tell whether someone’s from Germany or Denmark, then maybe all white people look alike. Anyway, when Lacey tries to convince her that she’s just spouted a series of ever-increasingly crazy things, this woman says, “Well, we’ll just have to disagree.” Some party.
STEM
Lacey’s child’s school had a meeting for teachers and parents of girls involved in STEM. They were talking about the importance of young girls being introduced to math. And, most importantly, how they’re introduced to it. Lacey said she’s always been bad at math and the speaker said, That’s not true. Someone told you that. The Black woman leading
the talk told the parents that women, Black women especially, have been told in school that they’re bad at math. All the Black women there nod their heads and begin telling stories about how their teachers all came to the conclusion that they’re bad at math. Lacey told this story:
In elementary school, Lacey always thought she was good at math. She always got great grades. She was constantly the teacher’s pet and was eager to do a good job. Now, in elementary school, when you’re supersmart, the only way you know it is your grades. There aren’t any special classes or groups or anything. But on the first day of seventh grade, Lacey got to take honors math class. Finally! She would get to be in the smarty-pants class with smarty-pants children just like herself. She could be the true nerd she was always meant to be.
Lacey walked confidently into honors math class. Like in all classes, she sat in the front. The reason for this is three-fold. I used to do it, too. One, because we have poor eyesight, and two, so we don’t get distracted by kids goofing off. And three, so teachers can see how perfect we are. The extreme nerd in her would have it no other way. In this class, she was the only Black girl. But that’s not a scary thing yet. Not in the seventh grade. In ninth grade, you may realize the situation you’re in, but in seventh grade, it’s still all fun. So on this first day of honors math class, the teacher began by calling students up one by one to do problems on the board. Some got it right, some didn’t. When they got it right the teacher gave a loud, satisfying “That is correct,” and when they got it wrong he said, “That is incorrect,” and then explained what exactly went wrong. He wasn’t too mean about it. It was just a way to get rid of some common mistakes early on. Lacey wasn’t scared because so far, she knew every answer to every problem. Even in this best-of-the-best nerd class! It was the validation she always craved!
When it was Lacey’s turn, she went up to the board and easily solved her problem. She put the chalk down and went back to her seat. The teacher checked her work and instead of saying, “That is correct,” he said, “Wait. Come back. I need you to solve this one.” Lacey knew some shit was about to go down. He had done this to no one else and she knew something wasn’t right. She also knew this man was not happy she solved it. She also knew why. Even in seventh grade you know why. But Lacey is only a seventh-grader. She is unbroken. After being praised in elementary school, she thought she was the shit. It was on.
He put an even harder problem on the board. One much more difficult than everyone else’s had been to this point. She solved it. She waited for her “That is correct,” but she got no such response. He heaved a heavy sigh. This man is clearly upset. A child doing a good job at what he has asked them to do has made this grown man mad. He then puts a math problem on the board the likes of which Lacey has never seen before. Lacey looks back to the class; not a single face seems to register “This is odd behavior.” She looks back at this teacher’s gross smirk. He won. Lacey just looked at him and said, “I don’t know how to solve this.” He said, “That’s what I thought. Now take a seat in the back.” Lacey moved her stuff to the back of the class. She never ever raised her hand in that class. The teacher never asked her another question, and she never offered any answers. Thus began her fear of math. She never took another honors math class again. Lacey even began skipping math class. But I’m not supposed to write that part in the book. So if you see her, pretend you don’t know.
Once, while at parent-teacher conferences, Lacey told one of her child’s teachers that story and he cried. He cried real tears. He kept loudly repeating, “That’s horrible!” And then—and this is not a joke—he showed her how smart she was by giving her a few math problems on the board. All of these questions were AP algebra questions. She solved them easily and wondered what could have been.
The speaker at the STEM talk said, “Never tell a Black woman she’s bad at math.” She then opened up the conversation, and this bunch of Black women were heard and encouraged. See? Good stuff happens, too. In fact, the next book is just gonna be all the times we were affirmed in our experiences as Black women. It’ll be one short-ass book.
Cotton Gin
So by the time Lacey got to high school, she pretty much knew the score. She could see the world for what it was and even understood that she could use this time as a high school student to try to make a difference. Lacey went to a high school in downtown Omaha. It was probably twenty-five percent Black.
Lacey was a part of a group of kids who got together and asked if they could have a Black history class. They expected an instant no, but instead the school had fifty thousand meetings about it. Student council, school counselors, vice principal, principal, student rally meetings—all kinds of stuff. All to talk about why it would be beneficial. Y’all. They couldn’t figure out why Black history class would be beneficial. They would have these meetings in the middle of the school day and before and after school. After one of the meetings in the middle of the school day, the kids returned to class. Lacey and three other Black students return to their history class. They walk into Mr. Lanklin’s class and everyone’s silently reading. There were only a few minutes left of class, so it must have been free reading time. Mr. Lanklin sees them arrive, stands up, and says, “Turn your books to page 129.” This is odd, that he just shot up like that, but okay. They do what he says. There’s a small paragraph at the bottom of the page. He reads only the first sentence of it: “‘Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin.’ There. There’s your Black history.” He slammed the book down on his desk and sat back down.
Side note: Mr. Lanklin was a scary person. And so was his wife. She was a teacher at Lacey’s elementary school. And although she never had her as a teacher herself, it was common knowledge that she was an actual witch with superpowers. I have no proof of this, but I also have no proof that this is not true. Word on the playground was that she was one of those witches that could cast spells and loved to torture children. Everyone knew that when you walked near Mrs. Lanklin, you had to cross your fingers or she would turn you into a frog.
President
In high school Lacey was helping Tasha, a Black girl, run for class president. Their group of friends were all sitting in the common area along with everyone else who was running for student government. There was an hour given to all candidates to make their posters during the school day. Tasha is the first Black girl at Central High School to run for president. Surrounded by white kids and their friends making posters, Tasha and her Black crew are feeling proud of her, sitting at the table hard at work. One of the counselors comes over.
“What are you doing here?”
“Making posters.”
“This is only for kids who are serious about running for class president. I need you to leave. This isn’t for kids who just want to miss class.”
The girls are sitting there with a pile of posters, markers, and posterboard. They are clearly making posters. This counselor went on and on. It escalated. Tasha was the type of girl to run for class president. She wasn’t about to take this lying down. The counselor got angry. He took the posterboard THEY BOUGHT, folded it in half, and threw it out.
Lacey, still a stone-cold do-good nerd, had never seen an adult act like this. It scared her. She left. She’s not proud of leaving her friends there. But she did. That counselor was scary.
A white kid won.
It didn’t take her long to figure out how the system worked. She began constantly protesting racism at her school. Twenty-five years later, a white woman walked up to her in the supermarket and said, “Weren’t you the girl who wore the ‘Racism Is an Illness, Are You Sick?’ shirt at school all the time?” Yes, she was.
The Drama of Miss Bell
Lacey’s always been into the arts. Painting, singing, acting. I think every Ruffin is pretty artsy. In high school, Lacey thought it was time to try being in plays and musicals. There was only one problem: the drama teacher was an awful human being.
Lacey’s best friend in high school was Mario. Mario and Lacey loved drama
class and musicals. They would rent musicals from Blockbuster and watch them. They would get together and watch PBS musical specials. It was Omaha, so they had to make do. The two of them noticed that every musical at their high school had no Black people in it. If you were Black, you had no hope of getting the lead role. It was just an understood fact. So, facts be damned, they decided to try out for the lead. Who knows! Maybe they would have a chance. The drama teacher did like the two of them, which was more than they could say for a lot of people. So they audition for the lead roles in the school play. They read the lead roles in their audition and nail it. Who knows what’ll happen, but they feel great about the job they did. The next day, the results are posted. Lacey and Mario, even though they auditioned for the lead roles, were cast as the servants!
That was not what they’d auditioned for. They were disappointed. They approached Miss Bell and asked why they were cast as the servants. She proudly replied, “Because when you auditioned for them, you did such a great job!” Lacey said, “We didn’t try out for those roles. Do you even remember what we read?” They called her out in front of everyone. After class she asked them to stay behind. “Don’t you ever question my authority again. Don’t you realize if you were to move to NYC right now, you would never get the main roles in a show? This is the best you will ever get. You should be glad I let you play the servants.” At this point, Lacey and Mario are too old to take this lying down. They take the complaint to the principal. In their meeting are Lacey, Mario, the principal, a counselor, and Miss Bell. They’re all sitting around a big table. Lacey and Mario repeat everything Miss Bell said to them. The principal and counselor find this unbelievable. You can see it on their faces. “I know Miss Bell, and she is too sweet a soul to say anything like this.” Before they can say anything to that effect, Miss Bell starts crying. “Why would you say that? How can you pretend I would do something so terrible?” Without missing a beat, Lacey applauds her and says, “Bravo. I guess that is why you’re the drama teacher.” It was her word against theirs. Lacey and Mario were never cast in a play or musical.
