Brett Chang’s Blog

I overheard a conversation in office today. It goes along the lines of:

Person A: “I used to work for an advertising company and my boss always hired cute Asian girls.”

Person B: “Me too! A while back I was working at a place and you could really tell that there was a trend where only cute Asian girls were being hired!”

Now, there is absolutely nothing wrong with hiring girls or cute girls. However, if you replace “Asian” in those two sentences with “white” or “black”, it would immediately sound strange to you, no? Wouldn’t those two sentences, although seemingly harmless and I can assure you that the people who uttered those words didn’t mean it, be rather racists?

Delving deeper, if the girls getting hired were white/Caucasian, they would just say “my ex-boss always hired cute girls”. No? There was a point to be made, unknowingly and subconciously, by the two people in my company, to show that they are “different” from the Asian girls and therefore becoming racists.

Yes, life is fickle and trying to be politically correct is impossible.