Months after an employee committed suicide, Facebook is at the center of another controversy; and this time it surrounds the company’s allegedly racist practices within the workplace. Several black employees recently got together and wrote an open letter calling out the frequent culture of racism.
You won’t have to look hard these days to find headlines detailing the long list of troubles that popular social media platform Facebook is in the middle of. Some are allegedly illegal, some shady and then there are those that involve racism. As reported by @The.Root, a group of black Facebook employees recently published an anonymous letter explaining that the culture at the company continues to get worse for nonwhite workers.
Published earlier this month, the letter highlights a variety of race-related issues employees say they have endured over the last year from Facebook managers, Human Resources reps and their white colleagues. The letter was co-written by 12 current Facebook employees, including black, Latinx, and Asian women workers.
The letter also includes screenshots of racially offensive posts from Facebook’s anonymous workplace community app, Blind. One anonymous poster wrote, “Are blacks really treated poorly or do they just like to complain?” Another followed up with, “[people complaining about racism] need to get over it or go to a different company. Bad enough we are using diversity as a measure for recruiting and lowering our standards.” Even more discrimination came from an employee who admitted his plans to get a black employee fired because he’s “one very arrogant black man who [thinks] he’s smarter than everyone.”
A partial excerpt from the letter reads:
“[We] cannot afford to be vulnerable externally because Facebook has made us a vulnerable target internally. Racism, discrimination, bias, and aggression do not come from the big moments. It’s in the small actions that mount up over time and build into a culture where we are only meant to be seen as quotas, but never heard, never acknowledged, never recognized, and never accepted.”
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has been called out repeatedly for the platform’s racism issues, specifically how the company marginalizes black employees and site users. Last year, former employee Mark Luckie circulated a memo to all Facebook workers just before his last day at the company, firmly stating, “Facebook has a black people problem.”
Add this to the list of reasons Facebook could use a major overhaul.