Is it racist to tell a Japanese colleague that you like sushi? No, says an employment-tribunal judge, in another welcome blow for sanity. This is the conclusion to a downright deranged claim of racial discrimination lodged by Nana Sato-Rossberg, a linguistics and culture professor, against her employer, the School of Oriental and African Studies (Soas) at the University of London.
It revolved around Sato-Rossberg’s alleged treatment at the hands of Claire Ozanne, the former deputy director and provost at Soas. After their very first meeting in 2020, the tribunal heard, Sato-Rossberg told a colleague that she suspected Ozanne would be biased against her. ‘People like me, a non-white female’, Sato-Rossberg said, ‘must constantly consider the possibility that they are treated unfairly because of gender or ethnicity’.
This seems to have become something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Primed for signs of alleged racism, Sato-Rossberg naturally went thermonuclear when Ozanne told her about a sushi joint she and her family enjoyed going to near their home. She thought she was making small talk, but to Sato-Rossberg it was bullying and harassment. This innocent restaurant recommendation was a ‘racist microggression’, it was claimed. After Soas cleared Ozanne of wrongdoing, Sato-Rossberg sued for race discrimination, harassment, victimisation and unfair treatment for whistleblowing. The judge presiding over the employment tribunal has now firmly rejected the claims, describing Sato-Rossberg as ‘hypersensitive’.
Employment tribunals have become an unlikely ally in the fight against unhinged racial identity politics in the workplace. Last year, Sean Corby, an employee of the government’s workplace conciliation service Acas, successfully took the organisation to a tribunal after his bosses forced him to remove comments that he posted on an internal social-media platform. Colleagues had accused him of racism. His outrageous speech crimes included criticising Critical Race Theory for being too divisive and promoting the more colourblind approach of Martin Luther King, that infamous white supremacist. In January, Carl Borg-Neal won an unfair-dismissal case against his former employer, Lloyds Bank. He was sacked after he unthinkingly quoted the n-word during a workplace training session about how to tackle racism.
Still, the flurry of such cases reveals what poison woke identity politics is to interpersonal relations. The explosion in anti-racism training sessions and racial hypersensitivity across the Western world, particularly following the killing of George Floyd in 2020, was supposed to bring harmony to our diverse workplaces and to right ‘structural’ wrongs. Instead, it has handed a weapon to militant offence-takers and left colleagues of different backgrounds more nervous around (and suspicious of) one another than before.
The obsession with racial ‘microaggressions’ – the crux of Sato-Rossberg’s ill-fated case – are a particularly deranging example of this. To those blissfully uninitiated, the term refers to minor, perceived social slights which supposedly serve to exclude minorities. The classic example is asking where someone is ‘from’, but the category seems to have expanded to include almost any encounter between colleagues of different backgrounds. Civil servants have even been taught that rolling their eyes or questioning someone’s experience can count.
There’s an obvious problem with this. One man’s racial microaggression is another man’s completely innocent question. It’s all totally subjective. To rid a workplace of any potentially clumsy comments would be to encourage members of staff to engage in a kind of neurotic racial etiquette – to treat one another differently on the basis of race. Which is surely the opposite of what is supposedly intended. Plus, it is profoundly patronising to suggest that all ethnic minorities are forever taking offence at white folks’ small talk and must be protected from it at all costs.
Here’s hoping the Soas sushi case is a sign that the tide is turning, at least a little bit, against the post-Floyd racial hysteria.
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