So my work just hired a woman, she is black. We already have several different ethnicities in our office but it is predominantly white.

We had lunch together and one of our managers was talking about her daughters, who she adopted as babies and are now grown women. They happen to be black and she and her husband are white. She told a funny story about how simple the people of the town were where she lived when her girls were little. She had taken them to get their hair done for church and they used hair extensions. For some reason, one daughters hair extention had fallen out during service and everyone gasped in horror that the poor girls hair had fallen out. She had to explain to them that it wasn’t real it was a clip and she was fine and not ill.

We all laughed, pretty much at the stupidity of the church people… well our new employee didn’t laugh. She seriously asked, “why did it fall out, did you put it in yourself? What salon, did you make an appointment or was it a walk in?” It was very awkward and she explained that this has been 20 plus years ago.

She tried to lighten the conversation by saying her girls loved getting their hair done and she always took them to nice salons. It took a long time but it was a fun event for them. The new employee said “well it shouldn’t take a long time.”

I have witnessed this situation many times when a white person talks about something outside their race. She wasn’t telling her the story because she was black and she thought oh you will get this… She told the story to the whole table and it was brought up because of a separate topic.

What do you guys think of this? Was it inappropriate? Have you ever witnessed something like this?

Topics: conversation, ethnicity, workplace, drama, race, Unity