Black employees told AORTA they regularly experienced acts of racism and anti-Blackness from their white colleagues but found that when they reported problems to human resources, there was “no meaningful consequence or accountability for racial harm,” a slide in the presentation read. The employees said they had been experiencing these issues and bringing them to management’s attention for years, but felt that little had been done to change the problems…
Wednesday’s presentation did not provide specific anecdotes from the survey because, Brown said, “there’s so few Black employees at Planned Parenthood that we wanted to remove any information that might be clearly identifiable.” (Black staff make up about 18% of PPFA’s 556 employees, the organization told BuzzFeed News.) Instead, AORTA divided its findings into the eight most common experiences recounted by Black employees.
“One of the first things that emerged in our conversations with you all was this sense of being over-scrutinized,” Brown said.
Employees said they felt they were “placed under greater scrutiny than white colleagues, both in terms of how Black staff are perceived at work, as well as the number of hours they work,” one of the slides said. Brown told staff that there were “lots of stories” of Black employees being expected to put in “extraordinary hours of work” even if they were going through a family crisis, she recounted, while white employees were given more leeway.
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