[nonplussed]

One of the toughest things about discrimination is being able to prove it. I'm a white man, but I spent time living in Japan where I was an obvious minority.

Some situations were clear to me that I was being treated a particular way because of my race. But then others were not so clear cut.

For example, one time I was talking in Japanese with a group and someone kept repeating what I said like "He said...". I was getting angry at that as I took it to mean that they were basically "translating" my Japanese for others. But then later, I was watching a Japanese TV drama and the same thing happened on there (with only Japanese speaking). That made me think that maybe this was just a cultural thing that people do and didn't have any reflection on me personally.

Having mentored a female engineer, I've seen that if you are constantly on the lookout for signs of discrimination against you, you will find so much of it. You'll go crazy thinking the whole world is out to get you because of your sex, race, etc. It's tough because there are no doubt situations where that does happen. But there are also situations where a white man would have been given the same feedback or treated in the same way. As a minority though, you only have your own experience to go on. It becomes tough to recognize what is legitimate discrimination vs what is just ordinarily communication.

[magicalhippo]

I have this issue with my SO where I'll sigh heavily and she'll interpret it as me disapproving of whatever she just did or did not do, inventing scenarios in case there's no immediately obvious cause.

Instead my head is somewhere else entirely, and I might have been annoyed at myself for forgetting to pick something up at the store or whatever.

We've gotten better at handling it, I try to remind myself to immediately tell her it wasn't her, and she asking me what it was if I forget. But there has been a lot of unnecessary bad times that originated from such episodes...

[runawaybottle]

I was watching a Dog Whisperer episode where this couple had a violent pitbull. It turned out the two people (mostly the girl) just wanted out of the relationship and deferred the conflict onto the dog as the conduit of the problem.

This is not uncommon for men or woman to do, and more commonly expressed as ‘you are looking for things to point out’.

You can run your own little test. Convert the sigh to something similar like shrugging. Consider it debugging with console.logs until you find out the source of the bug.

[etempleton]

This. It can be a challenge for anyone in the workplace, but I imagine it is harder for minorities.

One of the best pieces of career advice I have ever taken was from this TED talk: https://youtu.be/KzSAFJBLyn4

The section on Abraham Lincoln. Perceive no slights. It changed the way I approach people at work.

[h9n]

There's a real epistemological problem that people of protected classes face that I hadn't considered before reading this article and the comments here; one unintended effect of the current zeitgeist is that, because overt sexism against women is so heavily policed, almost nobody is going to be explicitly sexist against women, so women can get stuck questioning the motives behind potentially any interaction.

For those perceived as belonging to a privileged class, people feel free to (and in some cases relish in and are socially rewarded for) voicing their sexist opinions. A man has a lot less reason to dwell on whether a particular interaction was sexist against them, because when it does happen it is often overt.

[burlesona]

That's really fascinating. Did you ever learn more about that "He said..." behavior and what it's connotations are?

[nullsense]

Happens in English too when people simply say "what he means is..." and then rephrases what you said.