You are right, racism/sexism/etc are of a different shape in the U.S. I would not consider myself racist/sexist/homophobic. However, I have indeed felt the sting of being a straight white male.
I work in an IT department. About ten years ago, we were forced to hire an openly gay male by H.R. because of "lack of diversity" even though the other people competing for the open helpdesk position were more qualified. As time moved on, this person displayed openly aggressive attitude when his emotions took over. I once recall standing there while he said to a female manager "Fuck you, and fuck Larry!". Larry being a guy who worked for the manager in question who had given the helpdesk tech a hard time on the phone, resulting in the helpdesk tech telling him to fuck himself and hanging up on him. This incident went unreported with H.R. as the only manager present was the female, and she simply said "Oh XYZ, how can you act this way." and walked off.
Two years after this incident I was working on a server running powershell scripts, when all of a sudden my RDP session was terminated by the helpdesk tech in question. (Now, I am on the infrastructure team, and team leader. Technically the "Brass" to the helpdesk folks). I went over to the helpdesk area and asked this person to please be considerate of other people and let them know if he intends to take over a session. His retort was that I "couldn't talk to him that way, not his boss etc". To which I simply said "I'm not your boss, but the servers are under the domain of the infrastructure team". At which point he said "Get out of here before I punch you in your fucking face, I'm so sick of you guys and your shit (referring to my team). At that moment, I knew I had only one option. I went to the director of our entire department and explained the situation, during the explanation this helpdesk tech sticks his head into the DIRECTOR's office and says "I don't want Nurok or any of those other fuckers to come into the helpdesk area ever again!" and slams the director's office door.
We were both sent home for the day by H.R. I returned the day after, the person in question returned a week later.
I still remember the followup conversation with H.R. wherein the director of H.R. asked me what I think should happen to XYZ to which I replied "It's pretty clear he should be fired, as he physically threatened the safety of a coworker".
Long story short - nothing happened to this individual - he was eventually "laid off" three years later - which to any potential hiring agency looks like he wasn't fired.
The issue I take with this? If the roles were reversed, and I was threatening this guy as a straight white male - I would've collected my last paycheck via the mail a week later after having been terminated on the spot.
Inequality is color/race/sexual bias blind. And frankly, the stigma of white-boy overprivilege in this country is bullshit.
Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 01/24/2017 06:43AM by Nurok.