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.
You’re making a good point, but I think it’s also equally pretty weird to just dismiss a facet of someone’s humanity. It feels a little bit to me like the whole “I just pretend everyone is white”-approach.
I think there’s too much nuance to make a hard rule on it. I’ve worked with someone who’s go-to way to describe people was always ethnicity/perceived nationality-based to a weird extent, never with anything negative, but it was still jarring. Like he would say “the Bosnian guy who works with Steve” instead of "the guy who works with Steve ".
I would also find it strange if someone treated someone’s race like it was a bad word. Like, I think it would be fairly natural to say “what’s the name of the black guy who works in the shop?”, and much less natural to say “whats the name of the person in the shop who often wears black pants, and said they were a fan of that new TV show, and they said they were from Oklahoma, and …”
I agree that it’s awkward and it creates problems in some scenarios. I’m not sure it’s necessarily a bad thing, but it’s an understandable (over) correction for some pretty heinous behaviour.
At work? I think it’s preferable to limit our interactions to work related stuff.
Outside of work, I’m ambivalent. We associate physical features, names, and accents with cultures. But those don’t always line up to significant differences in someone’s personality.