Posted on 01/05/2007 9:10:26 PM PST by mfnorman
NEW YORK (CNN) -- James Jackson, a 26-year-old black employee of 180 Connect, was preparing for another day of installing cable, telephone and Internet service to residential customers of Cablevision in Nassau County, New York on December 7.
When he walked to the fenced-off area to pick up equipment for the day's jobs he looked up and was shocked to see a vicious, racist symbol in his workplace. A noose was hanging in the fenced-off equipment area, visible to the dozens of installers, the majority of whom are black, but accessible only to his boss and an equipment manager, both of whom are white.
Jackson, a former messenger who had worked at 180 Connect for a year and a half, immediately confronted the equipment manager, Dave Willie.
"I asked Dave," Jackson told CNN, " 'What is that hanging up there?' and he said, 'That is a noose' and I said, 'I know it's a noose, but why is it up there?' And he walked away."
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
#54----was the parking meter black?
(And I'm still in shock over Snoopy)
Looks like 'they' deleted both my original post & your reply! lol
You are so very wrong, it's painful. I've NEVER considered the noose to be a racial symbol. It's been used by every government or group since rope was invented, and blacks have no monopoly on it. It's arrogant to consider such a common thing your own property, morally. Only someone who has no historical perspective at all would think a handful of lynchings can in any way compare to the millenia of hangings that white people have suffered. More white people were hanged in any one century than black people in all of history. Get your hands off my symbol.
auberaussie, I didn't label you anything, let alone "racist"---I just don't do that.
I don't know what real point you could make in FOUR WORDS by pointing out obvious editorializing with a just as obvious recognition of it: with stories like this, I bet you could search newspaper and magazine back issues for months and not find a single one written by a reporter who did not feel it necessary NOT to be seen as a dummy because he didn't know that a noose put up in a workplace could be and would be taken by blacks to be a racist symbol . I think that is what is behind what you find distasteful editorializing.Why not just leave out also all the details about the employees being shocked, offended and trying to get a straight answer about what the noose meant? And as for your contention that in a journalism class, your putting in lines like that in a paper would have gotten you an "F".
I kind of doubt it---I figure the reporter who wrote this piece ALSO went and graduated to Journalism school, or something like that,and I can't imagine his published pieces in newspapers are somehow inferior to what he did in J class.
Well, YOU may think about cowboy's (sic) and the Wild West, but there were no cowboys working at this place, and we are not IN the Wild West. NO, the employees were BLACK and when they questioned the boss, he apparently said with a straight-face (but perhaps ignorantly and ill-advisedly tongue-in-cheek) that the noose was there to hang some of them. Let's talk about REALITY and not some theoretical associations of imagery from your childhood days of watching Wild Bill Hickok or Tom Mix movies at the local moviehouse. I am as aware as anyone about how incidents "like this" can often be a haven for opportunists looking to be offended and harvesting a big payday. They just may get one, whether they are emotionally traumatized or not: THIS case, however, is EXACTLY why the idiots have rushed in for the last twenty years and wanted to give everyone "sensitivity training".
Blame the idiot bosses for giving new life to the leftwing sensitivity training lobby.
I haven't said it should have been used in the work place. In most work contexts, I would agree with that. But I think the knee-jerk attribution to racist comment is even more detrimental than someone's dumb idea of a joke.
More and more this sounds like just another case of blacks looking for a big payday because they can't or won't do what's necessary to advance on their own merits.
"If a black worker perceived it was a demeaning treatment of the employees, he is correct."
Put down the PC Kool-Aid pitcher and step away from the table. Not everything said or done or thought in the presence of black people is automatically racist BECAUSE THEY SAY SO!
And BTW, my favorite detail was the quote from the lawyer, about how the boss's "first marriage was to 17 years to an African-American woman. So I don't think he's racist"
----I seem to recall Nicole Brown's "first marriage" was for nearly that long to one O. J. Simpson, so could most people figure that neither of them could be racists either?
I mean, you know, given how the marriage "ended".
I have no problem with hanging and no problem with the the death penalty either. Thanks for the info..~Pandora~~
Happens all the time.
It just happened at a fire department in southern CA. The firemen had a volleyball team, which included a couple of black firemen. One was a big, tall guy who played the net up in the front line. He was ALWAYS calling out, "Feed the big dog, c'mon feed it to me. Give it to the big dog", meaning get the ball to him so he could slam it over to score. Everybody liked everybody and got along well. This guy was very popular among his co-workers. One day, for a joke born or affection and camaraderie, some of the guys substituted some dog food ("c'mon, feed the big dog") into his bun from a bag of burgers they'd picked up for lunch. He ate a few bites and when he figured out the joke, instead of taking it in the spirit it was intended, he filed a lawsuit for race discrimination and just got paid $1.2 million last month.
Happens all the time. Remember the Denny's Restauarant scams? They got caught. Some other blacks tried the same thing at Cracker barrel in MI. It's happened umpteen times on college campuses and in work places all across the country. Jesse Jackson started it and it's nothing but a shakedown.
But you can read this thread and see that there is an automatic assumption being made that this was racial discrimination, absolutely, no question about it, even though vastly more white men have been hanged than blacks, be it through judicial hangings or vigilante actions.
I further submit that people in this country have become a bunch of thin-skinned pansies since they figured out they can profit from it.
There's plenty of truth to what you say, and it will be assumed, as we see right here on this thread, that because the employees were black, the noose was automatically intended to be racist.
But they could have put a tree branch there and black employees would say the same thing. Or an old gun with no firing pin, or a knife, machete, shoe box, crocheted blanket, picture of George Washington, cereal bowl, trash bag, notebook cover, a windbreaker jacket, or a big cloverleaf, etc.. You name it - if all the employees are black, whatever it was it would be morphed into something racist.
How do you know the guy who put the noose up there isn't a big fan of westerns? :>
You're welcome.
Maybe the noose had nothing to do with black/white relations, but was put there in sympathy for Saddam Hussein.
That's an interpretation that should appeal to the leftist media.
100% correct.
Ps I like your tagline, well said.
EVERYBODY is terrified of the hangman's noose! Do you think if a white person found a noose in his locker he would be LESS terrified knowing that someone sleeping in a room of fifty wanted to hang him?
Good grief. Do you have any critical thinking skills, or are you just a PC wind-up toy set to spew leftist dogma?
Agreed. Watching a company cave in to this whining shakedown crap makes me dislike the company as much as the shakedown artists.
Why should he be fired? Please explain exactly what you see as the problem with the noose.
You should have bought or borrowed a pot-bellied pig and walked it past the mosque.
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